


The Hydra of Thedas

by moreagaara



Series: The Emperor Revived [16]
Category: Dragon Age: Origins, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Arranged Marriage, Bards, Blood Drinking, Blood Magic, Blood and Injury, Brain Surgery, Breaking and Entering, Canon-Typical Violence, Chaos, Character Study, Compatibility, Conversations, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Deviates From Canon, Ears, Engineering, Explanations, Explosions, Eye Color, Eyes, Fanfiction, Gen, Genetically Engineered Beings, Guards, Horseback Riding, Horses, Hypnosis, Hypnotism, Invisibility, Invisible Ship, Literature, Magical Tattoos, Marriage Proposal, Military Training, Mind Games, Mind Manipulation, Minor Shapeshifting, Music, Musicians, Mystery, Normal Life, Organ Theft, Primarchs, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Second Chances, Sneakiness, Sneaking, Sneaking Around, Space Marines, Studying, Surgery, Survival Training, Talking, Tattoos, Technology, Tests, Theft, Time Skips, Training, Trials, Video Game Mechanics, Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:48:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24156118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Series: The Emperor Revived [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1447444
Kudos: 11





	1. A Little Test

_“Remind me again why you’re doing this.” Guilliman stood with arms folded in the middle of the bridge; every space marine and normal human on the bridge gave him a wide berth as they moved around him, even to the point of creating minor traffic jams rather than go anywhere near him. He glared at the person he believed was Alpharius; the true Alpharius was hidden elsewhere on the bridge._

_“For the tenth time, Guilliman,” Alpharius’s most trusted second didn’t bother to keep the exasperation out of his voice; admittedly, he was impersonating his Primarch, and his Primarch would not have hidden his exasperation either. “We are doing this because we’re bored, it’s Thursday, and this is our definition of fun,” he said, ticking the reasons off on his fingers._

_“The second reason makes no sense whatsoever,” Guilliman narrowed his eyes. “However, your definition of ‘fun’ apparently involves finding an unknown planet in the middle of nowhere and doing…what precisely?” Everyone on the bridge caught the edge of danger, and gave him yet more space._

_Both Alpharius and his second sighed, but it was his second—his Beta—who spoke. “I will explain in my quarters,” he said, and simply teleported away; Alpharius quickly moved to his quarters, using secret paths to beat Guilliman there. Even so, Alpharius only beat his brother by a few moments; it was enough to appear as though he had been there for several minutes._

_“So,” he calmly said, pouring Guilliman a glass of shipboard water; Guilliman accepted the glass but didn’t drink. “Like all Astartes chapters, the Alpha Legion is constantly in need of new warm bodies.” Guilliman nodded, still watching his brother suspiciously. “This in turn means that, like every other Astartes chapter out there, the Alpha Legion is always recruiting.”_

_“I’ve been meaning to speak to you two about that,” Guilliman sniffed his glass, then put it down. “The first time I was Lord Commander, I had all the Legions break up into Chapters of no more than a thousand men each. If you two are loyal now, then you will do the same.” His tone brooked no argument, so Alpharius waited a few moments before responding._

_“Honestly, Guilliman…we already do everything you wrote down in the Codex Astartes,” he said. “We did most of it from the point we were given control of our fleet during the Crusade. The rest we adopted after we nicked a copy of your book ages ago.” Guilliman blinked, and allowed him to continue. “The only real difference between what we do and what you do is that…well, ninety-five percent of the time, we don’t operate in teams of larger than five men. Two hundred teams report to an officer squad—also of five men—and all Omegon and I do is hand down the orders to the various ‘chapters’, I suppose you can call them, and we try to keep the full Legion capped. Moreover, technically I only have authority over half of those marines.” Alpharius deliberately did not tell Guilliman exactly how many Legionnaires existed, but in the interests of loyalty would tell him if he asked._

_Guilliman did not ask, however; he maintained his suspicion, and not without reason, Alpharius mused. “The only thing your book calls for that we don’t do is for each chapter to design its own heraldry and so forth, and that would be ridiculous considering how we actually operate. Stealth, secrecy, pretending to not even be Astartes…you’ve seen just how far undercover we go,” he reminded Guilliman. “Not just during the Crusade, but these days too. It would be stupid for any chapter to go fully independent like what you describe, because every chapter shares knowledge, resources, and glands with all the others. That being said, that sharing and the loose affiliation with everyone calling themselves Alpha Legion is about all the connection we have.”_

_“It’s the sharing part I have a problem with,” Guilliman folded his arms again and regarded Alpharius. “The point of my book, as you call it, was to ensure no one could do what Horus did and raise so large a force of Astartes again. The sharing you do threatens to undermine that goal.”_

_“And if it weren’t integral to how the Alpha Legion operates, I would concede the point to you,” Alpharius reminded him. “However, I do want to remind you that no one can ever raise a sizable force of the Alpha Legion without my—or Omegon’s—cooperation. Even if they somehow managed to convince a single squad to follow them, the second they convinced another squad to follow them, the sharing process begins, and both squads realize what’s going on, which tends to terminate the plan right there. How do I know that’s what happens? Because people have attempted to use the Alpha Legion in exactly the way you fear on no less than three thousand, four hundred, and eighty-six different occasions. And do you know how many times the Alpha Legion has directly threatened the Imperium as a result of such occasions? You should. Because the answer is zero.”_

_~~*~~_

Tavish tended to hide his anger behind slightly venomous smiles; not that the humans around him ever noticed the venom. They wanted to see an elf musician—even if the musician in question had something of a mouth on him—and so that was what they saw. They didn’t see the rest of him: fighter, thief, and pickpocket. Had it not been for his father—his mother having been the one to teach him the ways of combat and thieving, and to ensure he only stole from the humans in such a way that few would care—Tavish would very likely have been killing humans for years. It would have, in his mind, evened the score between humans and elves.

As it stood, he stuck to base theft. No need to find ways into the well-guarded houses of the wealthy and risk his own skin; for one thing, the humans there expected thieves, and for another, they would have blamed the elves who worked for them and punished one or more of them at random…and if anyone was going to be punished for anything, it was going to be Tavish, even if he hadn’t been the one to do it. Far easier to let his prey come to him at the inns where he played his music; humans noticed little, and they noticed far less when they were drunk. All Tavish had to do was play his music, wait for them to get so drunk they couldn’t tell up from down, and then steal whatever he wished.

Between the picked pockets, the tipping hat (always seeded with a few coins before he began performance to encourage further moneys), and the innkeepers paying him to come in the first place, Tavish usually made the equivalent of several gold coins a night. Rather than spend the lot on himself, however—the guards would have investigated him if he did; no mere elf was meant to have that kind of money—he distributed everything he got between everyone else in his alienage. That way, he improved everyone’s life. Sometimes his distribution meant the difference between life and death for an entire family; sometimes it meant that they could afford just one nice thing for their children.

Thus he was never caught, but even so, he knew the elders—and his father especially—worried about him. He knew they wanted him to accept his lot in life—and he had in his way—but he also knew that the way they wanted him to do it wasn’t right or fair. Not for him, or for anyone else. If he went along with the humans, if he accepted their treatment of him…he’d be just as broken as everyone else. At least his way meant that he could enjoy his guaranteed-to-be-short life.

Typically, after his evening playing at one of his less wealthy inns (an elven musician frequently being all the innkeeper there could afford), Tavish would sit on the roof of his family’s house in the alienage and practice his instrument. Once upon a time, he had bought a lute with money he had saved for years, but the moment he had taken it to play outside the alienage, a group of wealthy humans had stopped him, claimed he must have stolen it, and smashed it before beating him with its remains. That had been the first time he understood that humans would never see him as their equal; shortly thereafter, he had attempted to make himself like them by rounding his ears, but his mother had heard his crying and stopped him before he’d given himself more than a scar. Then she had started her lessons, and Tavish—unable to resist the call of music—had made another ‘lute’ out of scavenged wood thrown out by the carpenter, bent nails unusable by anyone but him, and wires the blacksmith had allowed him to take in exchange for sweeping out his shop.

It hadn’t taken long for Tavish to realize why the blacksmith was willing to do such a thing, or for him to fashion something to keep the dust out of his throat. But at least he had his wires, and that meant he could make his lute. Even if it wound up being too large by half—he had been working from memory—and the wrong shape, he could still play it. The sound was different than he remembered his proper lute had been—deeper, more resonant—but he could still sing along to it. And best of all, no one was willing to claim he’d stolen what he’d heard some humans call—within his hearing, and sometimes to his face—a pile of trash.

It was as he was sitting on the roof, idly playing a Chantry hymn, that he heard an odd thrumming in the air and looked up. In the air above him, something far too large to be a bird floated past on pillars of fire; he couldn’t clearly see what it was, as it shimmered and defied his sight, yet it was definitely _there_. He watched as it halted in the air, pivoted, and landed just outside the alienage wall in the fields beyond, and couldn’t help but sprint across the rooves to the wall and try to find it again.

There wasn’t much to see; there was a broad, flat depression in the grass—the arl owned the land past the alienage wall and hadn’t bothered to cultivate it—but nothing was there to make it. He squinted, trying to make sense of the scene, when all of a sudden, a caravan appeared from thin air. Dozens of wagons brightly decorated in various shades of green, and sporting a symbol Tavish wasn’t familiar with, and he knew all the symbols of the caravans that visited his city. There was something strange about it too, and Tavish looked for several seconds before he realized what it was.

The wagons moved, but no horses pulled them. His eyes widened, but then a guard grabbed him by his scarred ear and demanded to know what he was doing up there after curfew. Tavish panicked—and then the meal and ale he’d gotten as partial payment for his services that night rebelled in his stomach, and he threw it up all over the guard’s shoes. There was a cry of disgust, and then he was knocked unconscious.

~~*~~

Tavish woke in his bed around noon with a throbbing lump on his head and his sister sitting next to him. He groaned by way of greeting her, and she looked up from her sewing to look at him. “I hope you didn’t get the bright idea to try stealing from the guards,” she asked him, unfairly sharply in Tavish’s opinion. He started to shake his head, thought better of it, then waved his hand in a negative gesture. She sighed, then brought him some thin soup. “At least you weren’t that stupid. So what were you doing on the wall?”

“Saw something flying,” Tavish managed past his scratchy throat. He coughed, sipped the soup a little, and continued. “Couldn’t figure out what it was. Landed outside the city, so I went to the wall to see if I could find it.” Already his throat was much less sore than it had been; his sister must have put healing herbs in the soup, if he was feeling this much better this quickly.

She had a rather dubious expression, but knew him well enough to not accuse him of sampling hallucinogenic drugs, as some of the youths in the alienage did to escape their reality for a few short hours. “Well, if it’s any consolation, there’s a caravan in town. Humans, but they’re not too bad,” Tavish made a slight scoffing noise; his sister did tend to assume the best in everyone she met. She smiled at him slightly, but didn’t comment. “Their leader’s named Alpharius. Says he’s a Primarch from a land across the sea, and he felt like visiting other places before he officially accepted his title,” she continued.

“He got money?” Tavish asked, and was awarded with his sister chucking her pincushion at him. He wasn’t fast enough to catch it as he usually did, and it hit him in the face.

“Of course he has money, you idiot! And don’t you even think about stealing from him!” she scolded. Then she tossed her hoop at him before he could fully hoist his most innocent expression onto his face. “ _Don’t even think about it!_ Father’s had enough trouble finding you a suitable bride without you starting an incident with a foreigner with a metal boat.”

Tavish handed her hoop and pincushion back to her before he resumed working on his soup. “I wasn’t going to take much…” he grumbled, and this time did manage to catch the pincushion before it hit him. “So I am officially getting married, then? The Elders approved it and everything?”

His sister sighed and continued working. “Yes, they did. The date’s next month, when she arrives, and I’m working on your wedding clothes. Try not to get yourself imprisoned before then?” There was a note of pleading in her eyes, and Tavish couldn’t help but look away.

“I’ll try.”

~~*~~

_“And that is the benefit of having so many body doubles,” Alpharius commented to Guilliman from his place inside the Stormbird he’d converted to float on the water rather than in the air. There wasn’t any sense in frightening the feudal townsfolk that badly, and having a shipload of strangers from no known country turn up out of nowhere was shock enough._

_Guilliman said nothing in reply; the body doubles all wore armor not dissimilar in appearance to what the local leader’s army had, but all the body doubles’ armor featured cameras that allowed both him and Alpharius to see what they saw. With twelve of them wandering around, each of them claiming to be the Primarch Alpharius—the townsfolk quickly guessed that there was only one real Alpharius but couldn’t agree which one it was—Alpharius quickly gained a fairly deep understanding both of the immediate area surrounding the town, the local leader—who called himself arl, and both Alpharius and Guilliman had heard stranger titles—and the people in the segregated community named elves._

_The elves’ frightened—almost terrified—servitude towards their local humans and towards the new, stranger-humans bothered Guilliman. He suspected the feeling had something to do with the way his brother, the Emperor was treating the multitude of races on Azeroth; he still reacted without mercy if they proved themselves hostile, but when they didn’t—and they frequently didn’t—he treated them with the same sort of respect he would show a human. For the moment, he simply watched through one of the body doubles as a human guard shoved one of the elves around for no particular reason Guilliman could discern._

_“You know…in all the years we’ve been doing this,” Alpharius slowly said, breaking the silence. “I think this is the first time we’ve seen humans as a master species.” His tone was deliberately neutral, as was his body language when Guilliman looked over at him. “And that sort of thing would be how we’d get treated on any of the multitudes of planets we liberated from xenos. Even on the planets where the xenos in question were ‘liberators’.” Alpharius pointed at the feed Guilliman was watching, and made fingerquotes around the word “liberators”, but still maintained his overall neutrality._

_“It isn’t right when the xenos do it to us,” Guilliman finally commented; the guard had taken to beating the elf while the body double looked on. “And the Emperor is right about us needing to set the example. Which means that we shouldn’t do it to them.” He ground his teeth as he watched; had the person the guard was tormenting been a human and the two of them been in the Imperium…_

_“I couldn’t agree more.” Alpharius promptly tapped out an order to the body double, who eased himself off the wall and told the guard that it looked like the elf had had enough. Had learned his lesson, and wouldn’t do it again. The guard protested for a short while—to be fair, Alpharius had noticed this particular elf hanging around the caravan and watching the patrols of his guards with an expert’s eye—but eventually let the elf go. The guard missed the murderous look in the elf’s eye, but the body double didn’t, and neither did either of the Primarchs._

_“Pity he isn’t human,” Guilliman mentioned. “If he was, he’d make a good Astartes candidate.” He looked over when Alpharius didn’t respond, and saw his brother Primarch in a particularly pensive mood. Alpharius promptly noticed his looking, however, and called his attention to one of the other body doubles._

_~~*~~_

Tavish was very much not a fool. He knew bait when he saw it, and the very infrequently unguarded chest full of trade goods was definitely bait. On the one hand, he could certainly get to it before any of this Primarch’s guards spotted him; if he was careful and patient, he would have enough time to open it and take some of the goods. On the other hand, he knew for a fact that the guards had noticed his interest in them and in their Primarch—a stupid and nonsensical title—and had ensured that he saw exactly what was in the chest before changing their routine so that there was a gap to it. If.

On the one hand, he very much wanted to take the bait; just one of the items was worth more than he could earn by his usual methods in a week. On the other hand, it would be far too easy to trace the theft. After a while, Tavish entered the caravan as though he was planning nothing and merely staking out the place as usual, this time wandering towards one of the nearby metal wagons and leaning against it, feigning tiredness. He waited through several gaps with his hip on the wheel, simply watching the humans move around him, and after he was fully comfortable with the pattern, took advantage of the next to reach the chest.

The lock was easy enough to pick—it barely took him a thought—and he cracked the lid enough to reach inside. Yet he took nothing; instead, he merely turned one of the items so that it didn’t match its fellows before closing the lid and walking off. He realized, as he did, that the wheel he’d rested his hip against had turned freely when he’d moved, and slowed down to consider the idea. Then he realized that there had been a guard he hadn’t seen watching Tavish, the chest, and his actions regarding its contents. Tavish caught the man’s eye ( _strange how he looked so similar to his_ Primarch), but rather than speak, he merely reached out to the nearest wheel on the wagon with the chest and spun it; it whirled freely around its axle, and the wagon didn’t budge an inch.

The guard’s hairless brows lifted slightly, and Tavish returned to his usual activites.

Later that night, the innkeeper Tavish had decided to work for paid him immediately on his arrival. In fact, he paid him twice his usual fee, and Tavish’s eyes narrowed both at the innkeeper’s actions, and at the fact that the Primarch had apparently decided to visit his chosen inn. And buy rounds of drinks for everyone present. And liberally tip Tavish when he took the stage and set up his hat. And drink himself, heavily, acting exactly like a drunken rich noble with more money than sense.

It was far too much of a coincidence for Tavish’s taste, so he watched the Primarch closely throughout his playing; thus, he saw that the man played a perfect drunk, but his eyes remained sharp and clear no matter how much he drank. He also saw that the man didn’t bother to guard his purse, and Tavish had ample opportunity to rob him blind. Yet, while Tavish certainly did rob his usual targets, he left the Primarch alone but for slipping a note into the purse. A compliment on his acting.

When he arrived home, he found a note impaled to the underside of his pillow by one of his sister’s sewing needles; no one else had noticed it. He waited until nightfall to read it in the moonlight on the roof, where he usually played. _Thank you,_ it said. _Think you can break into my ship and steal my most precious possession?_ Tavish ground his teeth and tucked the note away. Of course he could. The question was, did he want to?

~~*~~

_All was quiet on the ship as the moon rose over the sea; Alpharius had placed some of his Legion’s gene-seed in a highly secured location on the ship, and informed his legionnaires that it was likely someone would attempt to steal it that night. Test or no, the gene-seed was precious, and his Legionnaires were on high alert. The chances of his potential recruit getting past them were almost nonexistent._

_Thus, Alpharius himself stayed in his quarters and waited for his Legionnaires to catch his prospective recruit; the outcome of the test would simply be determined by how far he got before he was captured. Hours passed; nothing happened. Had his recruit lost his nerve when he saw what he was up against? Alpharius’s brow furrowed as he continued reading some book a body double had ‘borrowed’ from the local religious order._

_His question was answered about midway through the book by the sound of a bolter being fired twice inside the ship, and his recruit’s voice. “I think I’d rather kill you,” he said, and his voice rang cold. Alpharius quietly opened his door to see what was going on, and was amazed. Not only had Tavish made it on board the ship, but he had gotten past the Legionnaires protecting the gene-seed and into the living quarters, all without being seen…and now he was facing off against a panicked Omegon armed only with a dagger._

_Alpharius immediately moved to stand between the two of them before Omegon fired again. “Wrong Alpharius,” he told his new recruit, hands extended to keep the two of them apart. Omegon was demanding to know what was going on silently; while Alpharius was sharing his memories, his new recruit threw his dagger at Alpharius’s eye. He caught it easily by the hilt and waited a moment to be sure his new recruit processed what had happened. “What’s your name, kid?” He kept his voice calm, still trying to defuse the situation._

_Omegon had started to calm down from having a dagger thrown past his ear; it had even scored his scalp as it passed. No wonder he had shot before asking questions…his recruit, however, had a darkness to him that surprised even Alpharius. “Tavish,” he said. “Not that it matters,” he continued with a snarl, then pulled a smaller knife and lunging at Alpharius. He moved quickly, but Alpharius was faster. In seconds, his recruit—Tavish—was on the ground with his arms behind his back and Alpharius kneeling on his legs._

_Tavish fought briefly, but then relaxed, trying to make Alpharius lower his guard. Alpharius wasn’t fooled, and pressed a little harder with his knee. “Nuh uh.” Tavish growled in response, but seemed to notice that Alpharius was only holding him still. “I’m not killing you because that would negate the point of the entire exercise up to now,” Alpharius told him, still keeping his own voice as calm and level as possible. “I’m not going to hurt you either.”_

_“Why not? Any other human would, considering I just tried to kill…someone who looks like him,” Tavish asked from his position on the floor, disgruntled that he had gotten something wrong at the last possible second._

_“Well, if I killed you, I wouldn’t learn how you got past my men, now would I?” Alpharius allowed a little sarcasm to slip into his voice, and was rewarded with a short bark of laughter. “I’m going to let you up now. If you try to slit me up, you get to kiss the floor again,” he said, and then let Tavish go and stood swiftly, but still slow enough that Tavish would be able to track his progress._

_Tavish pushed himself up more slowly; his movements were cat-like, and he clearly knew how to fight, if not against someone genetically engineered to be faster and stronger than normal biology could manage. Even so, both Alpharius and Omegon were impressed. After they exchanged a few more pleasantries—Omegon claimed his name was Betayn, the name of Alpharius’s current favorite body double—Alpharius explained the point of the entire series of exercises._

~~*~~

Tavish honestly wasn’t sure how to react to anything the two humans before him were saying. That they were testing him, he’d known, but to what end he’d assumed was merely to irritate him. To keep him busy while they protected their best treasures, or maybe to play a cruel game with the elven thief. Even if Alpharius had protected him on the street once, it didn’t matter; all humans were the same in the end.

And yet, they wanted him to join them. To join their so-called Alpha Legion, and come back with them to their home country. It would mean a lot of training—not that Tavish minded if it meant he could _move_ the way Alpharius could—and it would mean…modifications? “What do you mean by that?” he asked, genuinely confused.

Alpharius drew a deep breath and spoke carefully. “The basic point I’m trying to get at is that…training and experience will only get you so far. In our…country, we have to some degree mastered the essence of what makes us physical. As a result, we can modify that essence, and use it to make ourselves stronger, faster…as you noticed.” Tavish nodded; this did make sense, though it did sound rather suspiciously like the dark magics the Chantry warned about. “We have even managed to standardize our method, to a degree. The issue at hand, however, is that in order for it to work, you need to be…compatible, let’s say.”

Tavish’s eyes narrowed; he could tell that there was a lot Alpharius was leaving out, and he didn’t like the look on his friend’s—Betayn, he’d called himself—face. He wasn’t entirely sure what the man was thinking, but he was sure he wouldn’t like it once he found out. “And if I’m not…compatible, as you call it?”

“The process would kill you,” Alpharius answered baldly. Tavish blinked, appreciating the honesty. “Even if you are compatible, there’s still a decent chance you’ll die anyway. The modifications are fairly extensive and take years to complete, but the end results are…” he gestured to himself. “Impressive.” Tavish noticed that Betayn cracked a small smile at that.

“All right. So how do you mean to find out if I’m compatible?” Tavish asked, worrying about the response. If it meant magic…

This time Betayn responded. “It’s simple enough,” he said, and left to fetch a strange box. There were two colored glass bulbs on one side—one green and one red—and two depressions on the top. He set it down on the table between himself and Tavish, then fetched a box with their green, multi-headed insignia over a golden, two-headed eagle on its lid. When he opened it, Tavish leaned forward to see what was inside, and wasn’t sure what he had expected.

The box was divided in half, but each half held the same collection of items. There was a brown glass bottle filled with liquid, what looked to be a lump of undyed cotton, a coiled length of bandage, and something that looked like it might be a syringe, but Tavish wasn’t sure. He had only seen one once, when a human healer had been paid well enough to see to a very sick elven child in the alienage. Tavish watched as Betayn first tied the length of bandage tightly around his upper arm, then opened the bottle and applied some of its liquid to the wad of cotton. This done, he smeared the liquid into the crook of his elbow, and pierced the area with the needle on the end of the glass vial—it had to be a syringe—withdrawing it only after he had filled the vial with blood. Then he wiped the area down with the soaked ball of cotton again, removed the bandage from his arm, and discarded everything save the vial of his blood; that he firmly inserted into one of the two depressions on the top of the light-box.

Tavish still wasn’t sure how the light-box was supposed to do anything, but the process looked anything except painful, so he rolled up his sleeve and allowed Betayn to repeat the procedure—using the other half of the insignia-box—on him. The liquid felt strangely cool on his skin, and Tavish didn’t feel anything when Betayn pierced his arm with the needle, even though he was watching. Once Betayn had gotten a vial of blood from Tavish, he covered the tiny, bleeding wound in Tavish’s elbow with the cotton wad and tied it there with another length of the bandage. “You can take that off in about half an hour,” he said, not unkindly; the area was sore when Tavish rubbed it, wincing slightly.

“And now, the moment of truth,” Betayn declared, then inserted the vial full of Tavish’s blood into the other depression. The machine didn’t seem to do anything for several seconds, and Tavish was about to ask what was supposed to happen when the green bulb on the side began to shine. “Well, would you look at that,” Betayn said, leaning back in his chair and regarding the box.

Tavish was about to ask what it meant when Alpharius looked him in the eye and said, “Congratulations. You’re compatible.”


	2. Firsts

_Alpharius decided to walk Tavish home, and he did so by the obvious entrance to the converted Stormbird; it bobbed in the tide, but didn’t float too far away from the docks where it was tied with simple rope. The Alpha Legionnaires stood aside to let them pass, and most of them silently nodded respect at Tavish. Tavish returned the nods, but was clearly more than a little overwhelmed._

_“So how did you get on board?” Alpharius asked once they had gotten past most of the Legionnaires._

_“I swam,” Tavish answered with a shrug._

_“But you didn’t swim into the main door,” Alpharius pointed out. “Couldn’t have done, since it’s above water, and they would have seen the ship rock if you’d tried to climb in through it anyway,” he nodded back towards his Alpha marines; one of them nodded an affirmative._

_“There were two entrances below the water,” Tavish said. “I used those.”_

_Alpharius was silent for several long minutes. “That explains that, but you got really lucky no one decided to move the ship tonight, or you would be Tavish toast right about now,” he said._

_Those were the engines Tavish had climbed through. The exhaust pipes specifically, and the hatch was there to service them in case they broke. No, they burned a little hotter than his hearthfire back home. Hotter than the forgefire at the blacksmith’s. Slightly hotter than the crucible at the glassblower. No, he wasn’t making that up. Yes, that’s why there weren’t any guards back there. Tavish was to be commended for his creativity. No, Alpharius wasn’t angry about that…just surprised it could be done at all. He certainly wouldn’t have thought anyone would be crazy enough to try it—hence the lack of guards._

_The guards around the alienage were more than happy to let Alpharius take a shortcut through them to his room at the inn, though they then spent several minutes disagreeing with each other over which inn Alpharius was staying at, which gave Tavish the chance to slip through the open gates unmolested after Alpharius. Tavish never once had to correct their path; Omegon had had enough time to explore over the past week that Alpharius knew exactly where everything was._

_Tavish clearly expected Alpharius to leave once they reached his home, but Alpharius did not. Why was clear soon enough, since he explained the short version of the events to Tavish’s father: Tavish was exactly the sort of person their particular section of their country’s military was looking for, and so while recruitment was normally only open to humans, they had decided to test him anyway. After all, the worst that could happen was Tavish failed the tests, which he had not done. When he had succeeded so spectacularly, they had decided to give him the final test—Alpharius allowed Tavish to explain it, and took note of the holes in his understanding—which Tavish had also passed._

_By the law of their country, therefore, there was nothing between Tavish and joining their army save for Tavish’s own agreement. This, Tavish had already explained, was dependent on his father’s agreement and the elders of the alienage, as Tavish had called this segregated area. It was at that point that his father sighed and explained that he and the Elders had—in his words, finally—arranged a marriage for Tavish. Was there perhaps a way he could do both?_

_On the one hand, there weren’t any specific laws against an Astartes—best to use the official term—marrying, but it was strongly discouraged and not just because the ties of marriage might interfere with the Astartes’ job; the modifications also bestowed a kind of functional immortality, which meant that the Astartes was guaranteed to outlive his chosen spouse, and the loss was generally considered to be too detrimental._

_At that point, Alpharius had to stop and explain what he meant; when he said functional immortality, he meant that if an Astartes sustained enough damage he would die. But he would not grow old, and he would not get sick from any normal disease, and enough damage to kill an Astartes was enough to kill a normal person several times over. Alpharius decided against mentioning the Dreadnoughts; the concept still bothered him, and he had never made extensive use of them in the Alpha Legion. After all, there was a non-zero chance he or Omegon might be reincarnated inside one…_

_There was also one other issue, which was that an Astartes could not have children; another side effect of the modifications. The fact didn’t seem to bother Tavish, but he was young, and his father was much more concerned by that. If it sterilized the male Astartes, the father asked, then what did it do to the female Astartes? It wasn’t an unfair question, but it was another awkward answer. There were no female Astartes; no one was certain why, but female bodies reacted poorly when exposed to the multitude of modifications. They always died around the third or fourth modification, and there was no pattern anyone could see, else the person who invented with the procedure would have been able to fix it._

_Yes, there was an upper age limit to the procedure, and Tavish was just young enough that he could undergo it with some degree of safety. A few months older, and Alpharius would not be comfortable trying it, although there were ways and means…if a lot more risk. And then there was the fact that Alpharius felt that no one should have to undergo the procedure alone. The father wasn’t concerned about that much; he would make mention of this to the Elders in the morning, and they would find four potential companions for Tavish._

_Word would get out, of course, and so Alpharius decided to attempt recruitment from the human half of the city as well. Primarily to maintain the appearance of fairness, and partly to test Tavish just one more time; how well would he be able to work around humans from his own world?_

Tavish could hardly remember a time in his life where he felt truly happy, or even a time when his anger towards humanity as a whole had eased. He wasn’t sure where his happiness came from, but when he considered it carefully to himself, he decided that the promise of immortality wasn’t high on his list. Instead, what mattered most was the promise that he would be in a group that actually wanted _him_. Not just his skills, but who he was as a person. It was an opportunity he wasn’t likely to get anywhere else, and it was an opportunity open to very few others. He could tell that Alpharius was very much a fan of testing his recruits, so he made an effort to include humans when the Primarch asked him for suggestions for further recruits.

In the end, his list was six people long; four of them were elves, people he’d grown up with, and people who had not completely broken to human rule. The other two were humans, both of them skilled thieves; one of them had taught Tavish how to properly kill quickly and quietly, while the other was the only human Tavish trusted to give him a good deal for any stolen goods he acquired. Tavish was well aware the human resold the goods later for a significant markup, but he had never once cheated Tavish. Through him, Tavish had acquired an eye for quality.

Alpharius seemed pleased with his choices—or at least with Tavish’s effort to include people from outside his own race—and found four of his choices acceptable, of whom three were compatible. He had yet to explain what exactly that meant. The final selection, however, was Alpharius’s own choice, and turned out to be the arl’s youngest son. Tavish was frankly relieved that Alpharius had found someone, no matter who they turned out to be; the Elders had been unwilling to call off anyone’s arranged marriage, even for the promise of immortality—his father had gone out of his way to emphasize that part of becoming what Alpharius called an Astartes—and had told Alpharius that if he wished to do this, he had until Tavish’s bride turned up to find the last candidate.

By the time the arl had been convinced to part with his youngest son, his bride had been delayed in her arrival for three days; she finally did arrive one day after Alpharius had announced their decision, and was surprisingly not displeased about having her wedding cancelled. She was also surprisingly knowledgeable about the circumstances surrounding the cancellation—knowledgeable enough to make Tavish and the Elders suspect that either Alpharius or one of his doubles had spoken with her. But none of them had or could find any proof, so all the Elders could do was grumble about foul play. Even so, they had already given their agreement to Tavish and his elven friend becoming Astartes, and they would not withdraw it despite the suspicious circumstances.

Tavish did make an effort to spend time with the girl who would have been his bride; he got the feeling that they would have liked each other, if things hadn’t worked out so strongly in Tavish’s favor. His first task, he was told, would be to find the other members of his squad; once he had done so, he was to find the hidden Alpha Legion stronghold. And since Alpharius felt like being nice that day, he informed them it would be located somewhere within the arl’s sphere of influence.

It didn’t take Tavish long to track down his elven companion, and the two human thieves of the group found them. The four of them managed to find the arl’s son out riding alone through the forest, and the more murderous human thief decided to scare him a little before introducing him to the others. Tavish personally thought little of the arl’s son, but they all knew what Alpharius would think if one of them failed for any reason.

The arl’s son—Kamen—it transpired, had meant to track everyone else down, but his older brother—as his father was locked away with some more important noble from the king—forbade the young son going into the city for any reason. He had not, however, forbade his younger brother from going riding in the forest, and so he had done exactly that, trusting that his squadmates would find him. He had also scouted a few of the more obvious locations for the hidden stronghold, and had found nothing so far.

He had also made a few maps, which no one save Kamen could read the writing on—he therefore pointed to the words as he was reading them so they could follow along—and then mentioned that he couldn’t think of many other places where the hidden stronghold could be. They therefore took turns riding his horse—Tavish and his elven friend often rode together as they were the lightest of the party—and Tavish reined up sharply when they passed an empty field. “Careful with his mouth!” the arl’s son warned, and Tavish nodded distractedly while his elven friend—Analyon—apologized.

The selling-thief—Verhar—noticed his attention on the field. “What is it you’re seeing?” he asked, lightly smacking the arl’s son with the back of his hand to get him to pay attention. The arl’s son protested, but the protest was automatic, and swiftly quieted when he noticed Tavish’s deep attention on the field.

“There’s a depression in the grass,” Tavish said. “I saw something like that once before, and the Primarch’s caravan came out of it.”

The murderer-thief—Delyn—nodded slowly. “Best place to hide something important is in plain sight,” he murmured. “We should approach with caution. Finding the fortress is one thing, but getting in…” he trailed off, then approached the depression boldly, as though he had every right to be there. About ten steps into the field, he vanished. Tavish, for his part, had expected something like that, so he turned to Kamen.

“We should probably take your horse. If your family retrieves him without you, they’ll panic,” he said while helping Analyon down. Kamen hesitated, then nodded, taking the horse’s reins. Verhar simply regarded the space where Delyn had disappeared thoughtfully, but joined the others when they walked towards the same space. There was a slight pressure on each of their skins as they walked through what felt to Tavish like the skin of a bubble, and once they were on the other side, they saw a ship not unlike the one floating in the harbor perched delicately on the ground before them, and no Delyn.

All four of them had just enough time to realize that Delyn had been captured before something heavy struck each of them on the head, and they were knocked unconscious. Tavish retained just enough of his senses to feel himself be carried onto the ship and stowed in a small room with everyone else, and the ship push itself into the sky.

_“Alpharius,” Guilliman called from deeper in the ship; six different people leaned out of various rooms to look at him, none of them the true Alpharius. Guilliman, fortunately, didn’t seem interested in demanding the real Alpharius for the tenth time that day—that, or he was no longer able to care about which was the real Alpharius. “Why is there a horse on board?”_

_One of the answering Alphariuses replied. “We picked it up with one of the Aspirant groups. We’ll send it back down once they’re done with their final test,” he said, waiting to see if Guilliman would ask what the test was. When Guilliman failed to do anything of the sort, he leaned back into his room along with everyone else._

_Guilliman, however, wasn’t satisfied. “You know, Alpharius, I would be a little more convinced of your loyalty if you shared more information with me. This sort of thing_ is _why no one trusted you during the Crusade,” he said to the empty corridor. Several of the Alphariuses in the rooms surrounding him rolled their eyes and didn’t bother to respond. “Why the Emperor trusted you at all is beyond me.”_

_Soon after Guilliman had finished speaking, the actual Alpharius dropped out of the air vents in front of his brother, who rewarded him with a bolter aimed squarely at his forehead. Alpharius wasn’t impressed and reached up to shift the bolter’s aim to the floor. “One. If you ask questions, we will either answer them or tell you that we won’t. This is not the first time this mission that we have given you an opportunity to ask questions and you have neglected to do so. Two. Horus trusted us during the Crusade, because he understood why we fight the way we did and do. That neither you nor any other Primarch understand that is your problem, and not ours. Three. The Emperor trusted us for many reasons, and if you really want to know them, you can go ask him. It’s not like he can’t come if you need him.”_

_Alpharius and Guilliman faced off against each other in silence for several long minutes; neither of them was willing to give ground, and both were absolutely convinced that their arguments were completely correct. It took the Emperor showing up to get reports from the both of them for either of them to resume speaking to the other; most of the first ten minutes were spent yelling at the Emperor that the other wasn’t doing his job ‘properly’, or that they could be doing it better._

_After they had both calmed down, the Emperor very carefully defused the situation between the two Primarchs; he left only after he had explained his reasons for trusting Alpharius, Omegon, and their Legion to Guilliman (they were extremely effective if pointed at a target and permitted to do as they wished, and while they did tend to irritate those around them—including the Emperor himself on more than one occasion—they did it primarily to relieve their own boredom, and not out of anything even resembling disloyalty), explaining that Guilliman expected to be given more information than Alpharius was used to giving, and extracting a promise that both Primarchs would at least try to get along in the future._

_The Emperor left an uneasy truce in his departure; Guilliman determined that he would speak with the king of this country rather quickly, and only accepted Alpharius’s offer of a Stormbird to get to his own orbiting ship after much hesitation. Even then, he primarily accepted it to keep up appearances. He was grateful that the Legionnaire doing the flying decided not to show off, as they so frequently did; Guilliman might not be able to get motion sick, but he did growl at the waste of fuel and time such displays were in his view. When he got back, he found a relatively short description of what the final test Alpharius had mentioned was, and a shorter, extremely grudging account of the Alpha Legion’s strength._

Tavish woke up very suddenly, and found himself lying on the floor of an empty building. The door was shut, but he could hear people speaking outside; he listened carefully for several seconds, but the words made little sense to him. When he pushed himself to his feet, he found that the room he was in was small—barely half the size of his home in the alienage—and entirely composed of metal. When he checked to see what he was carrying, he found that someone had dressed him in a very strange assortment of clothing, and that he had no weapons to speak of.

 _Okay…_ he thought to himself, beginning to pace as quietly as he could. For some reason, despite his remembering having been hit over the head, he didn’t have a headache. He felt the urge to panic, but shoved the urge aside; if this was a test, then panicking would destroy his chances of becoming Astartes, along with everyone else in his assigned squad. They wouldn’t forgive him, and neither would the people of his alienage, and neither would Tavish himself.

He stopped pacing and closed his eyes, drawing deep breaths to make himself calm down. _The mission we were assigned back home was to find each other, and then find the secret location of Alpharius’s base. We did find each other, but…we found a boat, not a base. So Alpharius lied about the base being within the arl’s lands, but honestly, I should have expected that much…_ He started pacing again almost on instinct, but this time it was more because the movement helped him organize his thoughts. _Alpharius likes people who can adapt quickly. If I were him, and I wanted to test that in someone, I would put them in a completely unfamiliar situation. I would also put them in a situation where they wouldn’t be immediately trusted…_

Tavish opened his eyes again, and now saw a partially-rusted staircase leading up from the room he was in. It ended in a room with windows, and when Tavish sat near one, he found he could both see and hear the people talking all around him. He was in, of all things, a market of some sort; though he couldn’t recognize the goods being sold, he could recognize the body language of the people below him. _That man wants food. The woman selling it wants him to pay her…and he just insulted her with his offered price. She is threatening to call the guards to have him removed, and he’s not apologizing…_

When the woman did call the guards, the man was beaten with sticks that appeared to contain lightning, somehow. The woman then proceeded to deal with another customer, who offered her a fairer price, and obtained three of what she was selling in return. There were people perched in carriages that pulled themselves along, some fancy and coming down the slanting path between all the merchants, and others coming up it. People moved and shifted out of the way for the fancy carriages, and didn’t bother for the other, undecorated ones. The undecorated carriages appeared to contain supplies for the merchants…

Tavish sighed and rubbed his forehead. If he was to find his companions, he would need to leave the building. He didn’t understand the language, but he could get around that if he played mute…there was a way down from his room on the outside of the building, and in better shape than the staircase inside it. No sooner had he reached the ground than a pair of burly humans accosted him, and took him to a woman in one of the more opulent carriages; Tavish permitted them to manhandle him while she inspected him.

Apparently, she was satisfied with him, as she branded the inside of his arm with what Tavish assumed was her sigil and took him in her carriage to a room that ascended until they were above the thick, sickly-looking clouds, and Tavish could see the sun. When his eyes adjusted to the sudden light, he found himself surrounded by buildings that stretched upwards into what felt like infinity, most of them painted white or plated with gold; the two-headed eagle sigil was everywhere Tavish looked.

Soon, however, he was hustled out of the carriage and into a shadowed entrance at the back of one of the buildings; the guards gripping him by the arms took many twists and turns, which Tavish assumed were meant to disorient him. It didn’t entirely work; Tavish was able to remember the turnings from the various points where he got lost.

When the guards felt they had gotten him turned around enough, they took him up several flights of stairs and abandoned him in a pink room. _The hells?_ Tavish wondered, absently rubbing the area where he’d been branded. It then occurred to him that the brand—which had hurt very badly for the entire ride up to the building—no longer did. More importantly, the door to the room he was in was locked, and the window had had its edges painted over.

Tavish stood still briefly, then searched the room thoroughly to find something sharp edged; in the end, he came up with a knife. No sooner had he found it than something animal deep inside him demanded he use it to cut the brand out of his flesh, but he forced himself to cut the window free of the paint and force it open. Once it was, he climbed out; the brand began to hurt again the moment he was outside, but the urge to cut the brand free was gone. Clearly the brand was magic of the foulest sort, and Tavish didn’t want to run the risk it could control him. Rather than cut it free, however, he quickly and lightly scored lines through it, only just deep enough to draw blood and ruin its pattern.

He dropped from the window to the ground when he heard footsteps, and twisted his ankle on the landing. He swore, but made himself walk normally on it until he found a bucket filled with drying laundry; he used someone’s scarf to make a hood to hide his ears, and a different scarf to fashion into a bandage for his still-bleeding arm. From there, despite the continued stabbing pains in his ankle, he made himself blend into the crowd of servants, eventually finding a group headed out of the complex he had been taken to.

Unfortunate that he had to kill the guard to successfully leave; he hid the body as best he could, and left before anyone else could attempt to stop him. It didn’t take long for him to meet up with Analyon; he had been captured in a similar manner, though by a man in his case, and it had taken him longer to escape; Tavish scored his arm through the brand once he saw Analyon hadn’t done so. Then they rode one of the vertically moving boxes to escape the upper tiers of the city; word of their twinned escapes had gotten out, and a manhunt was being swiftly organized.

Kamen met them at the lowest point the vertical carriage-box could go; he was bruised and bloodied, but alive. He, apparently, had woken in the lowest levels of the strange city they were in, and his presence had offended some warlord. He had, fortunately, found a length of pipe suitable for a weapon, and had managed to get rid of his attackers, though not before they’d beaten him a fair bit.

Analyon expressed concern, but Tavish was the one to do something about it; he slipped away from the group just long enough to steal several bottles, one of them thankfully full of healing balm. The others turned out to be full of various strengths of acid; these Tavish kept in his belt as he offered the healing balm to Analyon (who had always been better with healing, and who used the balm on all their injuries) on the way into the maze between the much smaller buildings on this level of the stacked city. There, finally, they had a chance to catch their breath.

The first order of business was to find Delyn and Verhar; from there, they would need to find a map, if they could, and find a way to decipher it since no one could read or understand the language being spoken here. “I get the feeling we’re on a time limit…” Kamen muttered. “If we weren’t, I’d probably be able to learn the language and teach everyone else.”

“I get the feeling we shouldn’t stay in one place for two long,” Tavish replied, looking out between the buildings at the increasing number of people passing by. A few moments later, his eyes widened as he saw someone who was unmistakably Delyn; he let out a short whistle to attract his attention over to them. Delyn looked over, but had to reply only with the whistle they’d come up with back home that meant ‘I will come later’. Shortly thereafter, a man dressed like a guard noticed the three of them loitering, and they dispersed quickly before he could speak.

It was late in the night before they found another hiding spot, though none of them could tell exactly how late. Analyon kept glancing upwards, hoping to see the sun or stars, but there was nothing except the dirty-looking clouds. They sat silently until Delyn finally made it to them; he had brought them all clothing that allowed them look like everyone else in this section of the city. “Seems like you two—” he indicated Tavish and Analyon, “—got taken up to the Spires, where the nobles live, and you—” he glanced at Kamen, “—were tossed in the Underhive. In this part of the city, people work to provide things for the Spires, and we really need to blend in.”

It made sense, so they donned the clothing. “How hard is it to pretend you’re one of the workers?” Tavish asked.

“It’s not. They have a set ritual to do things, and they show you exactly what it is when you get to work. Only thing is you three will need to find separate buildings to pretend you live in; the good news is, we’re all young enough that it really will be our first day on the job, so they won’t expect us to know anything,” Delyn replied. “Any word on Verhar?” he asked, helping Kamen to adjust one of the pieces of clothing he’d brought.

“We were hoping you knew,” Analyon replied; Delyn simply shook his head.

Tavish thought about this. “Verhar’s really good at talking his way into things…the place I woke up in had a lot of shops. One of us should check those out,” he mused.

“It should be you,” Kamen said firmly. “You know him best out of all of us. The rest of us will try to find a map.” The rest of the night was spent learning the scattered words Delyn had picked up, and then each of them drifting off to find empty rooms in small metal houses that felt oddly comforting to Tavish; had they been made of wood and there been a sun visible through the clouds, he might have thought himself back in the alienage.

The morning came with a harsh buzzing sound that Tavish responded to mostly by looking to see what everyone around him was doing and aping them. From there, he kept an eye out for a set of tasks that looked like it might take him to the upper reaches of the city, and spotted a small group of men loading one of the carriages that he’d seen coming up with supplies for the merchants. He immediately began helping them, and was promptly berated until he did the task exactly as they wanted; he made many small infractions, but only needed to be corrected once for each of them. After a while, he was ignored even to the point of being allowed to climb into the carriage while one of the older workers began to make it move.

Tavish watched his hands closely; the older worker didn’t bother to speak to him, which suited Tavish just fine. There were knobs, levers, and pedals the worker pushed and pulled in some arcane manner known only to him that made the carriage move; but by watching him closely, Tavish eventually learned how the carriage was made to go forward and make turns. Eventually the carriage stopped behind some merchant’s stall and the older worker jerked his thumb towards the boxes Tavish had helped to load.

Fortunately, the merchant and his helpers knew which boxes were theirs. Unfortunately, Verhar was not there to respond to Tavish’s quiet whistling of a simple drinking song from the inn Verhar plied his trade in most frequently. Nor was he at the next merchant, or the one after that. The carriage was nearly unloaded, and Tavish was beginning to lose hope, when a second tone of whistles picked up the tune. Tavish looked up as he handed the last box over, and one of the merchant’s helpers winked at him.

Tavish and the older worker made their way back to the loading area to pick up more boxes; once again, Tavish helped to load the carriage, and once again was allowed to ride along with the older worker up to the merchant’s area. They stopped at the same shops; Tavish was quicker about grabbing the appropriate boxes this time, and still whistled the same drinking song quietly. This time, when they reached the last merchant, Tavish tapped the lid of the box he was giving to Verhar twice; Verhar responded with a nod and the ‘understood’ whistle. They did not communicate again.

By the time the day had finally ended, Tavish was exhausted. But instead of lying down and sleeping as he desperately wanted to do, he met up with his companions. All of them, even Verhar, were as exhausted as he was, and Verhar could thankfully read the map that Analyon had liberated. A merchant’s helper, after all, was more useful if he could read at least somewhat, and Verhar was good at picking up symbols.

The map indicated that they were in the largest and northernmost of the stacked cities in a ring around an empty patch of land. Nothing was out there, Kamen said, but immediately grew quiet. “Not even the people I first met would go there. Everyone who tried to cross from city to city on foot died,” he said.

“That’s where our friends are, then,” Delyn declared. “If you’re going to build something secret, put it somewhere no one else is willing to go.” It wouldn’t even take all that much time to get there; they would simply need to hide out in the Underhive until all the guards had stopped looking for stragglers.

And yet, something was bothering Tavish. “Both Analyon and I were captured by people who tried to imprison us and do some sort of black magic to us,” he said. “If we take care of those two people before we head out, we have a chance to do some good. Whatever they were up to couldn’t have been something anyone else in the city would like.”

It took some persuading, but in the end, Tavish did convince his fellows to follow him back up into the Spires before setting out into what Kamen referred to as the Wastes between the five cities. Once they had determined their course of action, they also decided to make as much of a production out of it as they could; if people were busy dealing with explosions throughout the city, after all, they would also be too busy to chase after them. Delyn knew how to make minor explosives; Verhar could easily obtain the materials for him. Analyon could place some of the explosives in the machines he’d been made to service, and Tavish could ensure the rest made it to other areas of the city. Kamen, meanwhile, could get them all weapons on the off chance they had to fight their way out; their plan, however, would require them all to work a few more days.

This they did. Verhar passed the materials to Tavish, who kept them until that night, when he could give them to Delyn. Delyn made the explosives over the next day, and gave the bulk of them to Tavish and a small handful to Analyon that night; the seeding of the explosives went smoothly. Once the explosives had been placed, the five of them met much later in the night than they usually did, as they had all decided to rest before meeting up rather than after; Kamen handed out the knives he’d gathered quickly and quietly.

The next morning was broken by the sound of explosions rather than the harsh buzz. Tavish immediately pelted out of his room along with all the other workers to meet up with Analyon, Delyn, and Kamen at their agreed location; there, Delyn was able to seize a carriage from a passing guard, and Tavish managed to drive it inexpertly up to Verhar, and then further inexpertly up to the Spires. Once there, they had to abandon it and steal another; they weren’t sure why their original carriage had stopped working, but knew better than to try and fix it.

Their new carriage, it transpired, could fly, and Tavish had a much easier time of locating the buildings he and Analyon had escaped from while flying. He did not, however, have an easier time keeping the carriage stable, and thus attracted attention. Thus, he pointed out a roof for them to meet up on and let Delyn off at the building that had once held him while everyone else jumped out on likely-looking rooves. Tavish waited until he spotted a particularly fancy-looking carriage before jumping out himself; above him, both carriages crashed into each other, and just next to him was the man Analyon had described as his kidnapper. Tavish promptly stabbed him through the throat while people screamed around him.

The first order of business was to change clothes and abandon his bloody knife; once again, this was made thankfully simple by someone leaving their drying clothes out for easy theft, and there were hiding places full of trashed goods everywhere. The second order of business was making his way to the roof he’d indicated; much more difficult from the ground, but he and everyone else managed. Delyn had managed to obtain another flying carriage for them; Analyon had fetched them masks that he claimed would allow them to breathe in the Wastes—pinched from the guards who occasionally flew over it—Verhar had smuggled them all food and comfortable boots, and Kamen had gotten them a box that spoke.

Once he managed to get it working—somewhere high over the Wastes that were just as empty as purported to be—they managed to piece enough of the language together to understand what they had done. The fancy carriage Tavish had flown the second stolen carriage into had belonged to the most important person on the planet; the two people who had captured Tavish and Analyon had been his seconds-in-command, and both were now under posthumous investigation for dealing in something none of them could translate.

In the end, it was Verhar who spotted the slightly too-regular pattern in the sand below them and pointed it out to the others. Tavish didn’t know how to land the carriage, so they all simply jumped out of it while it streaked across the sky above them. Thankfully, Kamen still had some of the healing balm Tavish had swiped, and they were able to heal their injuries before proceeding to the regular pattern before them. Analyon was the one who thought to simply knock; when he did, they were greeted by Alpharius, who regarded them for a few moments.

“As impressive as your exit was, do bear in mind that such displays aren’t always necessary. We would have accepted you if you had simply left that second night. Even so, your improvisation skills are to be remarked upon…though none of it would have worked had you all been on a true Hive World,” he said. They all blinked, and when they opened their eyes, they found themselves sitting in chairs in a large, metal, and circular room; two Alphariuses stood in the middle facing them. Eventually one of them nodded.

“Well done, Aspirants,” the one who hadn’t nodded intoned. “You have passed the tests and are all free to become Neophytes of the Alpha Legion. Since some of you are slightly older than is preferred, we will begin giving you the gene-seed immediately.”

Tavish had no idea what to expect, and neither had any of his friends. They followed the pair of Alphariuses somewhat meekly to a room with five tables adorned with serious-looking leather straps, all their minds whirling with possibilities of what was about to happen. They were, Tavish noticed, still wearing the clothes that they had been wearing when they had found the ship in the forest clearing; how much time had passed while they were in that strange dream world?

Beside each table stood two Alpha Legionnaires; each looked identical, save for their eyes in some cases; Tavish and each of the others were taken by the two Legionnaires standing next to their assigned table and helped out of their clothes save for their underthings. _Is it supposed to be this cold?_ Tavish wondered, shivering, but kept his eyes on the Alpharius who was speaking now. “I am Alpharius, and I am Primarch,” he said. Then the second Alpharius spoke: “I am Omegon, and I am Primarch.” There was no discord between the pair of them, and they next spoke in unison.

“Today you came before us as Aspirants to the Legiones Astartes. You have shown the aptitude necessary to begin training in force, and you will now receive the first three gifts which will allow you to be so. There are sixteen others; you will receive them all in time,” they said.

The Primarch who had named himself Alpharius spoke alone. “To receive these gifts properly, you must be awake and feel all that passes within this room.”

Then the Primarch who had named himself Omegon spoke. “After you receive these first few gifts, you will be true Neophytes of the Alpha Legion. Until you have received all the gifts, all Astartes will outrank you, and you will obey their commands when they are given. You may question, but you will obey.”

Alpharius again. “We have chosen you on behalf of the Emperor, whose might and wisdom created these nineteen gifts that we shall bestow upon you.”

Omegon. “In receiving these gifts, you become our sons, for it is through our flesh that these gifts are created.”

Both of them together. “Even as Neophytes, you are brothers to every Astartes around you, and the honor you earn shall improve us all.”

Then they were each helped onto the table they had been standing beside and tied down; Tavish did test his bonds, but they held him surely. Above him stood one of his assigned Astartes—it had to be an Astartes wearing Alpharius’s face—and he smiled slightly, sympathetically, as he hefted a deadly-looking blade. “This too shall pass,” he murmured, and carved his way into Tavish’s chest. Not all of them could bite back their screams; Tavish’s tongue bled where he bit into it from the effort. Still, he made himself watch with clenched fists as the Astartes worked quickly to place what appeared to be a smaller version of a heart and something fleshy and spherical into his chest. Once he had finished and had begun to close the wound he had made, the other Astartes with him made Tavish turn his head and say how many fingers he was holding up.

The activity helped him focus through the pain as the first Astartes cut a hole in Tavish’s skull. Tavish could neither see nor truly feel what he was doing; had the second Astartes not kept him distracted, Tavish knew he would be fighting wildly. As it was, he held still so that he could more easily see the fingers; he only occasionally needed to squeeze his eyes shut and take deep breaths to keep himself still.

Then he felt the piece of skull that had been removed get replaced. Both Astartes who were with him released the restraints and helped him sit; they even rubbed his arms and legs where his instinctive twisting had made the restraints dig into his flesh. They offered him a drink; whatever it was, it tasted vaguely sweet and somewhat metallic. Tavish assumed it was made of some fruit from their home country, and willingly drank the entire cup. Something stirred in his chest as he swallowed the liquid; his head cleared, and his desire to fight _something_ eased.

His friends, he saw, were in much the same position as he was; he fought hysterical giggles at some of the expressions on their faces—they did the same, but none of them could help the equally hysterical smiling—as they were led away to a smaller room, where there were fresh clothes, privacy screens if they wanted them, and more of their new brothers to help them get dressed. They all gratefully accepted the help; Tavish, for his part, was shaking too badly to lace the shirt or boots he’d been given, though like Analyon, he didn’t bother with the screen.

The room just past the changing room was painted in calming colors: a dark ocean-blue with forest green accents. There were dozens of things to do there; everything from knives and swords—better quality than anything even Kamen had seen—to books in a language none of them could read, but which their brothers could. Most of the books were simple, thankfully, and included pictures that illustrated the words, and once Tavish had managed to banish his shaking with the first pattern dance he’d ever learned using a pair of knives—weighted perfectly, as though designed especially for him—he sat down with one of his new brothers to learn to read.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which the final(ish) test is undertaken and completed, and many firsts are had. First time aboard a voidship, first time in a hypnomat, first time working together with humans, and first implantations. I assure you that there was much screaming; Tavish just doesn't remember it. Shock happens when you have to do surgery with no anesthetic.
> 
> Peep ownership!  
> Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
> Bioware/EA: Dragon Age and related  
> me: the writing and Tavish


	3. The Seeds Sprout

It had been five months since Tavish had received the first three gene-seed implants that would make him Astartes; in that time, he had managed to master conversational Gothic and was working his way through some of the technical manuals for the Alpha Legion’s favored power armor. It was slow going—whoever had written the manual clearly didn’t want laymen working with the armor—but he had managed to understand it well enough to draw a diagram of his own and label it in his native tongue.

He and the rest of his squadmates had been transferred back down to the surface of the planet; Tavish wasn’t sure what it was about being on the planet’s surface, but he and Analyon had both noticed that they felt better on a planet with real gravity and natural wind rather than on the ship, with its artificial gravity and recycled air. Their battle-brothers had encouraged them all to push themselves beyond what they had considered their limits; Delyn was amazed that a set of weights that he hadn’t been able to lift just four months ago now felt like air in his hands. Verhar went out of his way to find heavier things for them to lift, while Kamen found them all a series of exercises that tested their endurance. Both Tavish and Analyon could continue the walk-run sequence for nearly an hour after Kamen, Verhar, and Delyn had to stop; they had taken to continuing while carrying their friends: one on each of their backs with the third supported between them.

Meanwhile, their battle-brothers—the actual brothers changed from day to day, but they all treated the young Neophytes with the same kindness—encouraged them to keep their minds sharp and develop their curiosity, both about their own world and the worlds beyond they would eventually visit. Tavish privately felt the king of Ferelden—previously a distant figure he would never meet or understand—was a bit of a weakling and dangerously uninformed. If he ever had a chance to meet with the man, Tavish hoped to change that.

The metallic communication device clipped over Tavish’s ear chimed; he answered immediately while folding the power armor diagram he’d been working on away. The order was short and simple: report to the front gate of the ruined building just outside the local arl’s domain—not Tavish’s old arl, but a neighbor whose territory included a forest where some of the Dalish elves lived. “Yes sir,” was all Tavish answered, already moving. The fastest possible way down was out the window next to him, and from there, Tavish could fall in a series of ten-foot drops until he safely reached the ground at about the same time as his companions. They shared small smiles with each other—they had all left the building through similar means, and none of them would have thought to perform such stunts before becoming Neophytes—and stood at attention before their Primarch.

Tavish could tell it was Omegon who had come to fetch them by the way he stood slightly more tensely than his twin brother, and by how his eyes darted from person to person. “It is time for the five of you to receive the next two gifts. One will allow all of you to heal faster than any mortal man or elf. The other should allow you three—” here he looked at the three human Neophytes “—to actually complete the endurance training instead of being carried around all the time,” he smiled; they all grinned at the gentle mocking. The teasing meant little, in the end. “Stand close to me.” They did; golden light surrounded them, and they were on the ship.

Omegon led them to the operating theater; before they entered, they undressed and stood patiently in a clean white room that flashed for just a moment. Tavish resolved to ask his fellows what that had been later; Kamen in particular had been making a study of the gene-seed they had received and would soon receive, and might already know. Once again, they lay on the tables and strapped down; Tavish saw most of his companions taking themselves through some of the mental calming exercises they’d been taught, just as he was.

Omegon stood alone this time, and this time, they shakily followed along with his ritual lines. They were the chosen of the Emperor, and it was through his genius and wisdom that they would take the path of Astartes; the gene-seed they received made them the sons of the twin Primarchs, for it had been from their flesh and blood that the gene-seed had originally been created; and they were brothers to the rest of the Legion, and the cycle of honor and shared knowledge would make them Astartes and brothers of the Alpha Legion. The speech helped calm Tavish and the others further; they lay still, though they all cried out when the Apothecaries opened their chests.

Tavish once again watched as his Apothecary did his work; it wasn’t the same Apothecary as it had been last time, but that was to be expected. He blinked when he saw that his ribs had grown into a flat mass rather than the cage he was born with, and his eyes widened when he saw that the heart-like object he’d been given in the first surgery truly was a second heart—it echoed the beat of his original heart—and that the round, fleshy object had grown somewhat and extended white tendrils into the rest of his body. The Apothecary again worked quickly to place the two gifts: one of them looked rather suspiciously like a tiny liver, and the other was smaller still, with a hole in the middle. The tiny liver was placed inside his chest first, in a nest of smaller blood vessels, while the ring-shaped seed was inserted in the big vein above the joining of his two hearts; the incision bled furiously, but the Apothecary quickly sealed it shut once the ring-shaped seed was inside.

And then it was over. For the most part, Tavish only felt sore as his chest was closed again; once it had closed, he got another cup full of the sweet/metallic juice, along with the rest of his squadmates. Once again, they were taken to the changing room to get back into proper clothing, and once again they were helped. This time, Delyn didn’t bother with the privacy screen either; but this time—before they were re-dressed—their brothers shaved all the hair from their bodies. They had been warned of that much; their brothers had explained it was necessary for them to properly impersonate Alpharius; far easier for a bald man to impersonate a bald man than to have to worry about exact shades of hair.

The idea of impersonating another person didn’t bother Tavish—he was used to wearing different faces, depending on the situation, and once he had even pretended to be his sister—but he couldn’t help but wonder how he would manage to impersonate a human. His ears were the most striking difference, but his face was also narrower. On the other hand, he was more or less a match for his new brothers as far as body shape went; there were still many differences between the five of them and their battle-brothers, but perhaps that would change with time…

Best to not worry about it for now. For now, it was better to share what he had learned about the various machines the Alpha Legion used with his fellow Neophytes, and to learn what the others had learned about their chosen topics of study for the previous five months. Kamen had chosen to study medicine, while Analyon had chosen to study the history of the Imperium from which the Alpha Legion hailed; Verhar had chosen to study the enemies of the Imperium, while Delyn had chosen to study the other Astartes Legions—both those that served the Imperium and had been broken into smaller Chapters by order of the Imperium’s Lord Commander, and those that served a force called Chaos.

After a few days, and around the time Tavish began to feel vaguely ill from being aboard the ship, they were taken back to the old building on the planet, where their training resumed. Tavish found that all the books he had collected on machinery had been taken and replaced with books on each of the four topics his fellows had chosen. When he looked, he also found that the knives he had been training with had been replaced with heavier weaponry. He smiled, found a description of a pattern dance for the sword that was nearly as big as he was, and practiced.

_“One would think that a people recognized as a different species would not be able to adapt this well to standard gene-seed,” Guilliman mused, observing the small population of elves in the half dozen groups of Neophytes Alpharius had seen fit to recruit. So far, the humans of the groups were holding to the normal data gathered over the past ten thousand years; few of them met the requirements, even if they were of the right age, and those that did had a better than even chance of being unable to adapt to the gene-seed. The elves, however, met the requirements even more infrequently than the humans did, but so far, none of the elven Neophytes had rejected any of the gene-seed they had received._

_Moreover, while the raw strength of the elven neophytes grew more slowly than that of their human counterparts, it did eventually match the normal level of strength; the same was true of their height. Similarly, the elves’ speed and endurance improved far faster than that of their human counterparts, but stabilized at the normal level. Mental performance—Guilliman was unsurprised to learn that Alpharius instituted far more mental tests for his Neophytes than any other Chapter, past or present—was about the same for both groups, though the elves appeared to be more consistent across individuals._

_The Emperor, who was observing the process with them, spoke up. “They shouldn’t have registered as compatible at all, if they are truly a different species,” he said. “I would have suspected a false positive if the guts of that screening machine of yours weren’t based on blood magic.” Alpharius shrugged; he had taken one of the screening machines that was in maintenance apart to explain its workings to both Daenus and Guilliman—Guilliman had immediately demanded at least one for every currently existing Chapter, and Daenus had been able to create a stone out of his own blood that the machine could read and test against for far longer than the liquid blood Alpharius had been using. For his part, Alpharius had been surprised no one else had such a machine, and had provided Guilliman with several sets of schematics and working examples._

_“Which means that these elves can’t truly be a different species.” Guilliman tapped his fingers on the table before him; Alpharius sat quietly and calmly, but Daenus could clearly tell both he and Omegon were thinking hard. Daenus wanted to fidget, but he reminded himself that if he allowed himself to fidget around his brothers, he would have a harder time controlling such behaviors around the various leaders who reported to him._

_“Is there a way we can prove that, oh greatest geneticist of all humanity?” Alpharius asked, turning to Daenus with a slight smile. Guilliman growled something about respect; Daenus quietly murmured to him that he could use a good ego prodding from time to time, and Guilliman backed down, though not without a smoldering look at Alpharius._

_“Easiest possible way to do it is sequence the elven genome and compare it to the local human genome,” Daenus shrugged. “We have easy access to the city elves, but the Dalish might have variations we won’t know about if we only test the city elves. Just finding them will be quite a challenge…let alone explaining our purpose and that we mean no harm.”_

_“Perhaps if we brought presents,” Alpharius suggested, but Guilliman was shaking his head._

_“You’re not the only one who does research, Alpharius. They won’t want anything that comes from the hands of humans, even if it might help them. And besides, if we give them too great of gifts, we might destabilize the political situation here.”_

_Alpharius conceded the point with a sigh. “It is already fairly unstable…Ferelden did only recently free itself from a colonial power.”_

_“Unless the gift wasn’t something tangible,” Daenus pointed out. “They are trying desperately to hold on to their old culture. Their language, their gods, their customs. If we can find traces of it for them…they would likely accept that gift. Even if it does come from stinky humans. Alpharius?”_

_“On it,” he said, immediately sending out the equivalent of an entire Chapter to find whatever traces of elven culture they could, not just in Ferelden, but throughout the rest of the world._

Tavish had quickly adjusted to the extreme demands of his training; it had been nine months since the last surgical procedure, and his hair had finally stopped growing in. Whatever the chemical his brothers had given him to stop his hair growing back had actually been, it had been effective; Tavish couldn’t deny that much, though he had noticed an odd feeling in his skin where he’d been applying it. He decided not to worry about it; even if he had wanted to keep applying the chemical, he was out of the stuff, and between the lack of hair and the anti-hair treatment, he had much more time to train and learn (time that his battle-brothers had promptly claimed); he had gotten good enough at Gothic that he had been able to start learning another language, though one that didn’t seem to have a proper name. Whatever it was felt strange, even ancient, to Tavish; but it was also the language most frequently used within the Alpha Legion itself, and it was fun to figure out the patterns in it.

Still, many nights, it felt like his skull was full of lead for all the thinking he had done. He was grateful when Alpharius arrived to take them up to the ship for another procedure. He remembered from his readings that this one would involve another brain surgery—the next seed was to be placed in the back of his brain—but information about what happened after that was scanty at best. Tavish assumed it simply wasn’t discussed because it was similar to what had happened with the last two surgeries: he would change back into his normal clothes and then spend a few hours in the recovery room, and then as much time as he could on the ship itself.

This time, however, instead of lying back, Tavish and his fellows were asked to sit; their heads were strapped into a brace, but the bindings felt looser than usual. More of a reminder not to move than an actual restraint. The battle-brother with Tavish—the one not wielding the knife—had a screen that displayed a single color; Tavish was asked to identify it in the language he had started learning most recently—the one that was written in weirdly straight lines and wedges—and every so often he struggled to recall the words for the color he was seeing. The good news, he supposed, was that he barely noticed the Apothecary slitting the skin on the back of his skull and removing a chunk of hardened bone; his ear twitched at the higher-than-normal whine of the saw, but the noise was gone soon enough.

The colors came incrementally faster as the surgery went on, until it came in a shifting rainbow of hues. Tavish squinted and blinked at first, but after a while he felt himself relaxing. Someone was murmuring next to him; the language wasn’t familiar to him, but there was a definite rhythm to the words. Was he supposed to learn the language just from listening to it? It wouldn’t be the first time the Primarchs had asked such a thing of him—

_Sleep._

Tavish instinctively obeyed.

_He was floating inside a shifting rainbow, and he was perfectly safe. Words in Gothic floated before him; he was a member of the Alpha Legion. To be one of the Alpha Legion was to be a drop of water in a rushing river; to those outside, he was interchangeable with any other Legionnaire, but the river knew itself. Within the river, he was Tavish from Ferelden. He had been an elven thief and musician, but now he was Astartes Neophyte. To those outside the river, he was Alpharius, just like any other Alpha Legionnaire._

_The last gene-seed he had received was the Catalepsean Node. The Unsleeping. It did not mean he no longer needed to sleep; only that he could function for longer without rest. Longer than any mortal human or elf. The Node would act on its own, and shut down part of his brain while the rest continued to work normally, but he was in control._

_Tavish was in control. He would always be in control. This node was no different from his breathing or his heartbeats; it was new, but not bad. He could trust it to keep him healthy. Even so, he was in control. It was a very reassuring notion; he had been needing to eat far more than he ever had before, and it had felt like his body was trying to run away with him. He was the one in control of his body. His brothers would watch and help him if anything went wrong. He was safe._

Wake up.

_He did._

The Neophyte groups had been swapped around; a few of them had died, and their bodies had been consigned to fires. They had all attended, even those who had not been part of the dead Neophytes’ groups; those who had known them called them by their names, while those who had not called them Alpharius. A third Primarch, a stranger that the Neophytes gave space to, was also in attendance; he was dressed in majestic blue/gold armor, had a closely-shorn shock of blonde hair, and a wicked-looking scar across his throat. Both their Primarchs stood nearby, providing comfort to their Neophytes, who would not have continued the ritual with this stranger present otherwise.

As Aspirants and mortals, they had all understood the need for secrecy in all things; as Neophytes to the Alpha Legion, that need had only become more pronounced. For some of them, the sight of a stranger was discomforting; after the funeral rites were completed, their brothers encouraged them to learn everything they could about the stranger. After all, it was simply a lack of knowledge that was upsetting them; the fear of the unknown was perfectly natural, but the only way to ease that fear was to learn. For Tavish, it was an easy step to make; the hypnosis sessions made the response automatic, even instinctive.

The hypnosis sessions, overall, made him feel calm. Tavish did remember the old feeling of constant anger—towards humanity, towards the institutions that imprisoned him in the life of a thief, towards his own people for accepting their lot—but somehow, it no longer felt appropriate. The struggle that had defined his youth no longer felt important; he knew now that there were far greater things to worry about. Chaos and the Warp, for example, both of which sounded very much like the dream realm the Chantry had always warned of, the realm that mages tapped into for their power. And then there were the Eldar, both Dark and otherwise, that seemed to Tavish like dark reflections of what his people could have been had history not torn them apart. Not to mention the Orks, or some cosmic entity—somehow related to the Emperor—that wished to burn the universe to cinders for reasons unfathomable to Tavish.

He had read everything available to him on the topic, and spoken with everyone he could think of—even his Primarchs and the Emperor himself on one occasion—and come no closer to understanding the reasoning of this Sargeras. He didn’t like having to abandon a field of study, but there was too much else for him to learn—at the moment, he was immersed in piloting and navigation for the smaller ships the Alpha Legion preferred—and he needed to save his energy. The next procedure, after all, would be long and arduous; he would be receiving no less than six different gene-seeds in it. The chances of death were high, even for someone who was adapting as well as Tavish and the other former elves. And if he didn’t die, but couldn’t adapt…

Yet, Tavish felt no fear whatsoever. If he did die, his brothers would consign his body to the fires; if he didn’t die, but adapted poorly, his brothers would find him a lesser station within the Legion. They would still care for him as a little brother, even though he wouldn’t be able to help them nearly as well as if he had managed to become a full Astartes. If he was truly unable to function—if he adapted so poorly that what he had could barely be called life—the Primarchs themselves would grant him mercy, and then he would be consigned to the fires as if he had died naturally. Death was merely a natural progression of life, so far as Tavish and his battle-brothers were concerned, and while he understood why others went to such lengths to avoid it, he didn’t understand their fear.

Admittedly, he also no longer really understood why others felt many emotions. Happiness, he understood. Pleasure—especially pleasure in completing a difficult task—he understood. Desire for more, he understood. But base greed, lust, temptation, cowardice, fury, and so many others, he did not. Likely a result of the seven months of hypnosis sessions—which could and did begin at any point during the day or night—being so frequent and so _calming_ ; that, in combination of his brothers’ demands for an analytical mindset, might have been what caused his sudden emotional lack. He would need to learn to fake the emotions he himself could no longer feel, most likely, and have to logically analyze the situation to find the one most appropriate; it was what his undercover brethren did.

 _Seven months, and I’m sixteen now,_ Tavish mused. _They’ll need to do the next procedure soon._ Grueling didn’t begin to cut what he would need to be awake through. A second stomach, of sorts, an organ that would allow him to gain the memories of creatures by eating them—how _that_ worked was well beyond him no matter how many textbooks he devoured—a third lung with sphincters to close both it and his original lungs off, alterations to his eyes and ears—the typical surgery only took one ear, but the Alpha Legion had long since taken to altering both—and a brain implant that would let him enter suspended animation. Tavish had no doubt that one would require several sessions in the hypnomat, just as the Catalepsean Node had. Not needing to sleep was still a very strange sensation, but at least Tavish could still sleep if he needed to.

He was grateful when one of his brothers approached and signaled for him that it was time; he promptly reached a stopping place in his work—repairing a deliberately broken flight console—and went down to him. It only took a moment to reach the roof where Alpharius was waiting with three of his new group of Neophytes; the last arrived just a breath after Tavish. They teleported up, proceeded through the clean room to the surgical chamber, and laid back to be strapped down.

The straps had to be made of woven-metal cord now, instead of mere leather; all of them could easily break free of the leather restraints, Tavish with barely a thought. The woven-metal cord, on the other hand, wouldn’t give no matter how much they pulled. Even two full Astartes pulling on it together couldn’t rip even a single thread. Tavish did his best to breathe normally as his torso was split open from neck to navel, but wound up biting his lip when they sliced into the bulletproof plating his ribs had fused into.

As always, the brother acting as Apothecary worked quickly. They removed a portion of his esophagus to splice the poison-neutralizing second stomach into his system; that pain wasn’t so bad, though Tavish still clenched his fists and strained against his many bonds. The real pain began when they started tugging at the nerves connecting his original stomach to his spine; it flared every time they made a connection to the memory-devouring gene-seed, and every time he thought it was over, it worsened. He could almost _feel_ exactly what was going on in his digestive system with every breath he took—

Air started to leak out of him. Instinctive panic loomed— _I am in control_. Tavish opened his eyes to see the face of one of his brothers, the one taking no part in the actual surgery. He took the deepest breaths he could under the circumstances and made himself focus on their face. They had grey eyes, a rarity among the Alpha legion; most chose to have their irises tattooed icy blue, like the Primarchs’. Tavish hadn’t decided yet what he would do on that front…he groaned loud and long as the Apothecary induced the growth of blood vessels into his new third lung. Several _things_ popped just under his throat as he breathed— _the sphincters_. Tavish was in control. His brothers would help and protect him. His breathing calmed as his body was allowed to repair itself naturally, the healing so immediate he was barely aware of it.

The table he was on tilted upwards; the Apothecary-brother slit the skin over his left temple, then carefully removed a chunk of bone. Something was gently pressed into the underside of his brain; Tavish was blind in his left eye for a few seconds, and then in his right for a few more. His fingers clenched around a brother’s hand; had his brother been mortal, he would have shattered their hand without even meaning to. Something thin and flat was slid into the gap between his brain and skull; it felt vaguely itchy as Tavish’s vision returned slowly and stayed grainy. The chunk of skull was replaced and his skin allowed to heal on its own.

Tavish heard a loud whining, and then all was silent in his left ear. In the space where his left ear _had been_ ; something new was being attached there, and Tavish heard noises that had no connection to what was truly happening around him as his new ear was connected to the old nerve. Disturbing noises that sounded like the sorts of things that would occur in the horror movies his current squadmates most enjoyed watching. His battle-brothers switched positions; all went silent in the space where his right ear had been, and then the horror-noises repeated themselves slightly louder this time. There were no monsters nearby; Tavish was in control of himself. His brothers were there to help him.

It was over. His brothers released his restraints; blood flowed awkwardly past the deep grooves Tavish’s instinctive, partly-controlled thrashing had carved into his limbs. He could stand with help, walk with aid; his brothers let him do as much as he could on his own. For a long while, he could only manage to sit on a stool behind the screen in the changing room—the first time he’d made use of it—and shake. The first drink his brothers brought him tasted awful—worse than the cheapest beer his home village had served—but he still drank it gratefully, as his throat was wickedly dry. The second drink was more of the fruit-like juice he received after every procedure; he drank it a little more slowly, and felt well enough to dress himself once it was gone.

No one felt much like interacting in the recovery room, and their brothers did not force the issue. The first drink had left an odd taste in Tavish’s mouth; despite the awful taste, he oddly wanted more of it. It had made the itching in his skull go away; maybe it could also fix his vision? Then again, without knowing what it was, Tavish couldn’t ask for more of it, and something about his brothers’ postures made him suspect they would lie to him about it. Better to leave it alone; hopefully the craving would go away eventually.

_“You know, I noticed something,” Guilliman mentioned the next time he and the twin Primarchs—he was certain it really was them this time—were alone. “Out of all the Astartes chapters and the old Legions, you two use the hypnomat the most and drug therapy the least. Why?”_

_There was a long pause, and it was Omegon who eventually spoke. “You know how a lot of the old Legions had what we might refer to as ‘little issues’? We have one of our own. And we don’t like to talk about it, because it affects our survival rate and effectiveness as a Legion by a lot.” Alpharius said nothing; he only regarded the table before him with intense concentration._

_“Tell me,” Guilliman ordered. Neither of them answered. Eventually, Guilliman leaned forward; Omegon flinched, looked away, then stood up to stare out a viewscreen. Alpharius gritted his teeth. “As Lord Commander—”_

_“Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare pull rank on us, Roboute,” Omegon spat, deliberately mispronouncing Guilliman’s first name. He was shaking, and badly; Guilliman’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t afraid, was he? There was nothing to be afraid of on this ship, let alone in this room…_

_“If it concerns the health of your…Legion…” Guilliman growled the word with distaste; he had seen enough of how the Alpha Legion truly operated to trust their word that—like the Space Wolves before them—they could not be broken up as the Codex Astartes required. “Then it concerns the health of the Imperium. And that means it is my concern, like it or not.” Neither Primarch responded; Omegon kept staring out the viewscreen at the moon slowly drifting past, while Alpharius had laced his fingers together around an imaginary cup. Guilliman allowed the silence to last for several minutes before he slammed his open hand on the table._

_Instantly, a bolter shell roared past his ear. A second, then a third struck the back wall, neither of them getting as close as the first had, and then Alpharius stood between Omegon and Guilliman, with Omegon’s bolter pressed firmly into his gut. Omegon’s finger trembled on the trigger; Alpharius was saying something that Guilliman couldn’t quite hear. He started to step closer, but the Emperor—suddenly there when he had been absent for weeks—held him back. “Don’t. You’ll only make it worse,” he was saying in Sumerian. The language of a youth Guilliman barely remembered, and a youth he had begun to realize Alpharius and Omegon remembered far better. He looked from the Emperor to Omegon—whose finger had finally relaxed on the trigger of his bolter and who was starting to answer Alpharius—with a question in his eyes. “That is Omegon’s story to share,” the Emperor—Guilliman’s brother, not his father—stated, and there was an implacable firmness in his voice. He would not be moved, not on this._

_Eventually, Alpharius managed to help Omegon out of the room and to what Guilliman assumed were his chambers; the Emperor calmly stepped between the pair, blocking all but a few portions of Guilliman’s armor from Omegon’s view. He stayed until Alpharius returned, and this time Alpharius was shaking—but it was rage, rather than fear, that shook him. Yet he still spoke with a rigidly enforced level of calm that Guilliman suspected had very little to do with Alpharius’s personal feelings at the moment._

_“You. Are overstepping your rights,” he said. “Lord Commander does not mean you need to know every single detail of the lives of those around you.”_

_“Because that’s your job, isn’t it?” Guilliman couldn’t help the acidic retort; he managed to block the blow to his stomach, but not the one to his face. The Emperor edged between them, but only slightly; more a reminder of his presence than an interference._

_Alpharius took several deep breaths before he continued. “Yes, Guilliman. That is our job. And since it has been made clear that the Alpha Legion is, at best, an unwanted polyp of the Astartes Chapters, you have no need to know about any problems that we may be facing. We have been solving them ourselves for thousands of years; we haven’t needed your help before, and we don’t need it now.”_

_There was another long period of silence. “Respect does go both ways,” Daenus gently reminded them, again in Sumerian. He was acting more as older brother than as Emperor; they could both tell that much. Alpharius didn’t seem to change his stance by so much as a fraction of a millimeter; Guilliman took some time to reflect on his treatment of them and their Legion since they had formally declared their true loyalties. In public, and in ways that could not easily be taken back._

_He had treated them with nothing but suspicion and distrust; on the one hand, it was what they deserved based on all of Guilliman’s past dealings with them. Even during the Crusade, their methods of dealing with recalcitrant planets had been—in Guilliman’s view—wastes of time and resources. They had frequently taken weeks or months to bring a planet to heel when they could have taken days—all because Alpharius would claim that the simple way would be too boring or too easy. And then there were the incidents in which Alpharius had deliberately manipulated Guilliman into doing something, when he could have simply asked nicely._

_And yet, since Alpharius had returned to the fold, he had been the one trying to mend the relationship between himself and Guilliman. He had offered information to Guilliman, though he had also left multiple gaps in it—gaps that, as far as Alpharius was concerned, Guilliman could bridge by simply asking nicely. As Alpharius could and should have done in the past. Guilliman sighed and looked away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s hard to not be suspicious of your intentions, considering…history. But I should be trying, and I haven’t been.”_

_Alpharius watched him for a while, and then nodded. “Thank you. And the issue we’re dealing with is addiction.” Guilliman couldn’t help leaning back slightly in surprise; he wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but…then again, it made sense. If they couldn’t use the drug therapies, both Astartes and Neophytes could mentally break from their implants. Worse, it would mean that the Alpha Legion was physically inferior to their counterparts: weaker, slower, and generally less effective on the battlefield…no wonder they operated in secrecy. “I trust you won’t tell anyone else about this. We would find it rather embarrassing.”_

_A stiff response, but a response nonetheless. But even so… “Why not simply build your power armor so that its machine spirit has full control over how much drug gets dispensed when?” Guilliman asked; Alpharius turned away, growling something Guilliman couldn’t quite hear in Sumerian. It was the Emperor who answered him._

_“You have no idea how inventive addicts can get when they need a fix, for a start, and the Alpha Legion Neophytes all learn how to do field repairs for their power armor. Some of them also learn how to build their own suits.”_

Tavish had adjusted to spending extended periods of time shipboard; it had only taken two years of steadily longer periods on board with rest periods of being planetside. He rather suspected his new ears—and no longer being able to get motion sick as a result of their improved inner structure—were what had allowed him to spend as much time as he needed on board. Being on board the ship allowed him to learn and train harder and faster than ever; the only things holding him back from learning everything available to him at this point were the necessary sessions in the hypnomat and the other necessary sessions in the Apothecarium.

In the hypnomat, he had been learning how to activate the Sus-an Membrane at will; if he needed to, he could place himself into a sleep so deep that none could wake him without a specific cocktail of chemicals. He could, however, wake himself from the state, so long as he was in a safe place. _Like the hypnomat,_ Tavish mused with a slight smile. He had managed to put himself under and wake himself up twice, so far; the first time he had gone under, he had needed the chemicals to wake back up. Afterwards, he had been kept under close watch to ensure he didn’t attempt to dose himself with them; when he had asked, his battle-brothers had explained the Legion-wide issue with addiction and that Tavish was more than far enough along in the implantation process that it had manifested in him.

Tavish had been and still was relieved that his recent cravings (for the post-surgery juice in particular) weren’t some sort of hidden weakness surfacing from the unceasing training of his recent life. Knowing what it was he faced meant he could turn his mental power towards fighting the cravings and beating them as he would any other foe. Four months after the grueling six-part surgery, he was within an inch of his full-Astartes brothers’ heights, very nearly matched their strength and speed; all he lacked at this point was the grace with which they moved, and that would come with time and practice, and Tavish got all the practice he could ever want and more.

Interestingly, the Lyman’s ear implants he had received were—as his Primarchs put it—modified slightly. They had included a series of neuro-reactive machines within the ear’s cartilage that should extend and retract at Tavish’s thought; they hoped the machines would allow him to have the ears either of a human or of an elf, depending on the situation. Tavish had considered this, and had promptly begun practicing both extending and retracting the machines; it had taken the machines some time to learn what the signals from his brain meant, but once they had, they worked exactly as the twins had described. Tavish had promptly suggested they create similar machines to allow him to alter his face shape in a similar way, and had worked with the twin Primarchs—with the occasional supervision of the Ultramarines Primarch (a man for whom Tavish’s respect was only slightly dulled by his needing help to come back from the dead) and a man who wore no armor who seemed to appear and disappear at will, who was frequently flanked by other men nearly as tall as the Primarchs themselves in fanciful golden armor wielding deadly-looking spears—to design the machines.

Inserting the machines into his flesh had delayed his next round of implantations by four more months, but they worked perfectly. Tavish could simply decide whether he wished to be a human or an elf that day, and change his face and ears accordingly; it mattered little to his brothers what face he wore. He was still Tavish, and he was still their Neophyte brother. His face did, however, matter a very great deal to the people of Ferelden, even those who had heard of the distant empire that went by the name Imperium; the old anger no longer stirred in Tavish’s breast when he was confronted by it. So, where he had once reacted with venom—backed into a corner as he had been—he now simply made note of the worst offenses while elven and treated the people who committed them with ever so slightly less respect while human. Moreover, once Tavish had demonstrated the effectiveness of both sets of face-altering machines, nearly all of the Alpha Legion gained them; even to Tavish, the change seemed to happen overnight.

And all throughout this, Tavish was occasionally taken to the Apothecarium to have bright lights shined in his eyes. The purpose of the procedure baffled him, until the unarmored man—who introduced himself only as Daenus—explained. The lights were stimulating certain hormones and newly-inserted genes in his eyes; they, in turn, would eventually allow him to see in ranges beyond normal human vision and in lighting conditions far darker than any normal human could process. Tavish hadn’t been sure whether to believe the man he later learned was the Emperor of the Imperium—and the very unwilling god thereof—until he had started to notice two new unnamable colors everywhere throughout the ship, in places he was certain they had not been before. Both were vivid, though one of them was hotter and brighter than the violet in the rainbow, and the other was deeper and richer than the red in the same rainbow. _Ultraviolet and infrared,_ Daenus had named them when Tavish had asked. _Because humans are fantastic at naming things,_ he had added with a completely straight face that left Tavish wondering if he was joking or not. The golden-armored man with him certainly acted like it was a joke, but still…

Both colors—the infrared more than the ultraviolet—helped him find his way around in dark places he would previously have been blind within. Similarly, both colors—the ultraviolet more than the infrared—helped him to both send and receive hidden and encoded messages; typically, Tavish promptly learned, the Alpha Legion only really needed the ultraviolet ink to prevent its messages from being intercepted, but they used the ancient language with its all-but-forgotten lettering as an extra layer of security in case an enemy Astartes captured the message, and included the encryption more as a brain teaser and game for the recipient than anything else. A game, in fact, that included high score tables in the largest ship belonging to the Alpha Legion. _One day, my name will be up there._

But first, there was another set of procedures to complete. This one would only involve three implants—the six-implant procedure Tavish had gone through was unusual and only performed on older Neophytes like himself—but it did involve what was, in Omegon’s words, a flawed gene-seed. The Melanochrome had degenerated somewhat for their Legion; once implanted, it had an unfortunate tendency to turn a Neophyte’s skin color a sickly shade of grey. On the upside, it still protected them from electromagnetic radiation, as intended; on the downside, it made the Legionnaires distinctive. They had, however, created a solution for the problem: electric tattoos that could be programmed to mimic normal skin colors.

Soon enough, Tavish and his most recent group of four fellow Neophytes—they had coincidentally all decided to wear human faces that day—were cleaned and strapped down on the surgical tables. They all spoke the ritual phrases—they were the chosen of the Emperor, the sons of the Primarchs, and they would bring honor to their brothers—before the procedure began, and they all did their best to hold still. By this point, Tavish was used to the feel of the scalpel on his flesh; his muscles bulged against the restraints, then relaxed. As always, the Apothecaries worked quickly; the insertion of the Melanochrome went smoothly, though Tavish wasn’t entirely sure what they were connecting it to. He could feel that it was being placed near his hearts, but could also feel that it wasn’t being connected to his arteries…admittedly, he stopped worrying about it once the removed section of rib shield was replaced, and the Apothecary cut into his abdomen for the second organ of the procedure. A specialized kidney, which would filter out poisons that his body otherwise couldn’t deal with; perhaps Tavish felt it more because he was less used to his belly being cracked open, or perhaps it was simply that it needed to be connected to so many systems. Either way, Tavish bit his tongue trying to suppress his screams and writhing.

There was a pause for several long moments after Tavish’s belly was closed back up. The Apothecary made sure he was well enough to continue: Tavish was allowed to just breathe for a while, the assisting brother allowed Tavish to squeeze his hand, and laid a calming hand on his forehead. Then the Apothecary asked if Tavish wanted to stop now and wait a few months before they gave him the Neuroglottis. He shook his head slightly. “I’m okay. Keep going,” he told them.

“You’ll need to keep your head still,” they gently reminded him; Tavish nodded once in response and laid back on the table, trying to relax. Fortunately, the insertion of the final organ for this procedure didn’t hurt so much as it felt weird; Tavish couldn’t help his changes in expression as the Apothecary inserted what felt like a camera up one nostril and carefully pushed the Neuroglottis deep into his nasal passages through the other. Tavish quickly started breathing through his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut; his neck muscles flexed, then relaxed in rhythm as the Apothecary began to attach the organ to the interior of his nose, extending portions of it down to his hard palette.

Once the Apothecary had carefully removed his tools, Tavish was freed. Once again, he was helped off the table and taken to the dressing room; unlike with the last procedure, he didn’t feel the need to hide behind the screen, and neither—he noted—did anyone in his group. They were well enough to joke with each other, help each other get dressed, and generally socialize to the point that their elder brothers’ presence was hardly necessary. Even so, they all appreciated them being there; of the five of them, one hadn’t been able to go through with the final gene-seed implantation immediately. Tavish and the rest didn’t tease him; they all assured him that it didn’t hurt, that it merely felt strange, and that he probably wasn’t the only one of all the Neophytes, even if he was the only one in their particular group.

After they were all dressed, they primarily used the recovery room for a few quick rounds of unarmed sparring; while they rested, they discussed the similarities and differences between the Imperial Cult back home—it was strange, but somehow true, to use that word for a land they had never visited—and the Chantry here in Ferelden. From there, their discussion turned to whether Ferelden—and the rest of the planet it was on—ought to be annexed to the Imperium at all, and their full brothers were more than happy to join the discussion. Between themselves, they weren’t able to come to a decision; despite all their learning, there was much about the Imperium they didn’t know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which most of the rest of the surgeries are done. I should probably not post these so late at night because then I could probably make better notes. Probably would also help if I read over these before posting but oh well.
> 
> Peep ownership:  
> Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
> Bioware/EA: Dragon Age and related  
> me: the writing, Tavish, and the Emperor's name


	4. Rise Alpharius

Six months had passed. Six months, and Tavish had learned much. The exact scent of his brother marines—hardly different from the scent of his Primarchs—along with the scents of the Ultramarines Primarch, Roboute Guilliman, and the Emperor. The fact that it was entirely possible to find his way through the ship by smell alone, and the nearly overwhelming bouquet that enveloped him during his trips planetside. Being able to identify through taste alone the components of his food, instinctively knowing whether they were or were not edible…but the fact that Tavish was in control wasn’t in doubt anymore. He hardly needed the hypnomat to remind him of that.

The drink he was given at the end of every procedure was partially composed of beets—a vegetable that grew fairly well on board the ship—and the blood of both his Primarchs. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the last part, even knowing there was no other way to activate his gene-seed. Even knowing that the blood magic both the twins and the Emperor practiced—and which Guilliman was aware of but either couldn’t or wouldn’t use—could be used for good. Including creating the Astartes, the Thunder Warriors (whom the Emperor spoke of only with regret, rapidly changing the subject whenever they came up), and the Primarchs themselves. It was how Tavish and the other elves had been proven compatible, when they had been thought to be a different race from humans, and therefore incapable of producing Astartes.

Thus far, only two former elves had died, compared to eight of the former humans. Strange that the people the implants had originally been designed for would reject the organs so frequently, in Tavish’s opinion, but despite all his training, he only halfway understood the medical processes inherent in the implantations. Far more interesting and comprehensible were the machines Tavish and his brothers used; he had taken to going out of his way to track down the blueprints to the machines they used, and to creating them if none existed. It wasn’t that he couldn’t perform the implants if he was required to fill the role of Apothecary—like all the Neophytes, he was trained to do such things—but he was simply better with the machines (and their purported spirits) than medicine.

The Ultramarines Primarch informed him that had Tavish been a recruit for his Chapter, Tavish would have been permitted to delve into the machines to his heart’s content, until he was an expert at creating the minor machines, fixing them, and operating them, above any of his battle-brothers. Specialization was necessary and, in his view, critical to the proper functioning of any given army; Alpharius didn’t disagree with him. From what Tavish had seen, his little brothers and the unmodified humans and elves who worked with the Alpha Legion were permitted to specialize, but the actual battle-brothers were not. Naturally Tavish had asked why this was so, and was slightly nonplussed by Primarch Guilliman echoing his question. “Yes, why _is_ that the way you do things?”

So far as Tavish was concerned, the answer Alpharius gave was perfectly reasonable. The battle-brothers could be required at a moment’s notice to go anywhere and do anything; they might need to infiltrate a sect which abhorred machines, for example, and in such a situation, a techmarine would be a detriment to the rest of the team. Similarly, if they were caught in a deadly situation, and no one on the team was an Apothecary, then the entire team could be lost and their gene-seed unrecovered. Yet the Primarch Guilliman wasn’t satisfied with the answer; after all, his Chapter and indeed all Loyalist Chapters with the exception of the Alpha Legion operated his way, and they had incurred no significant losses as Alpharius was suggesting. It was Tavish who offered that Guilliman’s Chapters also operated with more men—far more men—than the Alpha Legion usually did, so there usually was an Apothecary near enough that, at the very least, gene-seed recovery simply wasn’t an issue for them as it was for the Alpha Legion.

That had promptly been countered by Guilliman saying the Alpha Legion didn’t operate like a proper Legion or Chapter, which had roused Alpharius’s anger. At least this time, the Emperor hadn’t needed to interfere (though he did co-locate to the area—the skin on Tavish’s neck announced as much); it was enough for his Primarch that Guilliman had taken a breath and stated that the Alpha Legion’s different methods of operation were useful, in their way. He supposed. Even so, the two Primarchs didn’t speak again for several hours, though both of them made very good excuses for their behavior.

Not that it mattered in the end; Tavish only indirectly answered to Guilliman, and was largely shielded from his potential wrath by both Alpharius and Omegon. The only way he would be directly exposed to the Lord Commander’s wrath was if he broke one of the bigger laws of the Imperium—and in that case, the Emperor would be on him well before the Lord Commander could get to him. Since Tavish had no intention—or need, anymore—to break those laws, he doubted there would be a problem; the laws of Ferelden were another matter entirely.

He and his team—set for the next four implants—were being considered for a recruitment mission among the mages of Ferelden. It wasn’t an official mission yet; there were still many things to consider, including how well the five of them could coordinate. Tavish had suggested that their first order of business should be creating a network of individuals—both humans and elves—who would watch for signs of magic in their young. In that way, they could recruit their new Librarians before the Circle could, and then they would not need to recondition their new brothers. The rest of his team agreed with him, so long as they also set up a similar network in the town just across the lake from the Circle Tower, and made friends with both the mages in charge of the Circle and the Templars who controlled them.

It was quite the project, but one Tavish was itching to begin; even so, there were four separate procedures to complete. Thankfully, they could be completed within a few months, and Tavish should be a full Astartes by the time he was eighteen; also thankfully, Tavish would only need to adjust to one new implant at a time. First the Mucranoid—which was to work in conjunction with his Sus-an membrane, and would allow him to survive even in a hard vacuum by way of mucus secretions—then a set of glands that would allow him to spit poison and chew his way out of a metal cage if necessary, then the all-important Progenoid Glands, and finally the Black Carapace. The last would allow him to properly wear a suit of power armor, to move with the heavy armor as his full-grown brothers did, to use its more advanced functions. Though Tavish had worn some previously—having stopped growing at just over eight feet tall, which made him one of the tallest of all his brothers—it had been a less than magical experience.

He hoped the carapace would change that, even if that particular implant was a long way off. More important was the order of implantation, and of course, holding still during the procedure itself. Not much of a trial this time; Tavish greatly preferred the procedures that required him to sit upright, such as this one. It meant he could hold a proper conversation with his attending brother while his Apothecary slit the skin on the back of his head, near where it joined with his neck, and fiddle around with the Mucranoid, his brain stem, and his spinal cord.

“See you in a couple months,” his attending brother said once the Apothecary closed him up; Tavish grinned back at him as he left to get dressed and rest for the enforced hour with his group in the recovery room. They all wound up staying about three hours, as their group conversation wound through a variety of topics, including what potential missions they might receive. The Librarian recruitment mission Tavish already knew of, but there were others, including the protection of a place called Oneccia—a planet that Alpharius had unofficially adopted as his territory—the harrying of various xenos forces throughout the Imperium, and the bothering of other Loyalist Chapters to ensure they were keeping their skills sharp.

Tavish doubted they would be assigned anywhere near Azeroth or the forces of Chaos; rightfully, the Primarchs tended to commit their most trusted Astartes to such important missions (or simply go themselves), since they had learned long ago that sending some of their newest recruits could mean that said recruits could get too into their missions. Tavish and the others had been regaled with several stories about Legionnaire recruits who actually did attempt to become Daemon Princes, so as to gain favor with Chaos. There had been another memorable story about a fresh recruit attempting to use the Dark Eldar as pawns in his scheme, to his detriment. In Tavish’s opinion, his fate as a limbless, screaming wall hanging in the Dark Eldar’s webway city was his own stupid fault.

In the meantime, his skin appeared to bloom grey in patches; Tavish awkwardly attempted to hide them at first, and this time his group reassured him that he would feel better once his skin was entirely grey. And that the tattooing process didn’t hurt, even if it did involve implanting a series of crystals just beneath his skin. Admittedly, Tavish was no stranger to pain any longer, but something about being repeatedly stabbed with needles bothered him greatly. Thankfully, he wasn’t the only one who felt that way about the tattooing process, and also thankfully, he could enter a Catalepsean sleep while the electoo was implanted entirely in one session—the rest of his group received it in stages, body part by body part, but they all learned to control the electoo by thought (connected as it was to the brain) at the same time.

Activation was a strange feeling; it was primarily just a severe prickling under his skin, but the prickling did fade from his perception after a while, as he grew used to the sensation. Tavish found it was easiest to shade his skin a single color—most frequently, the paled nut-brown of his Primarchs, but occasionally his original slightly leathery tan or the milky shade of those who spent most of their time aboard voidships. One of his grouped brothers learned it was possible to have the electoo show colors other than normal skin tones, and to have it display them in patterns not dissimilar to a normal tattoo. Tavish didn’t have much time to practice before it was time for the next non-tattoo implant.

Another implant in which he was allowed to sit, though having to have his mouth held open by a ceramite brace was distinctly uncomfortable. There were two parts to this implant; one of them nestled under his tongue and extended out under his teeth to his lower lip, while the other sat along the sides of his hard palette, and extended forward to his upper lip—again passing under his teeth. Once he had the post-surgery drink, his mouth tingled for a while; once the tingling had finished, he found that as with his stomach alterations, there was a low-level background awareness of the glands. A few sessions in the hypnomat later, he understood that he could use them to get energy out of things otherwise too difficult to digest, or to free himself from a prison, or even to spit the venom at someone’s face. Tavish was fond of aiming for the eyes, as was most of the Alpha Legion.

A month passed. Tavish trained, and learned, and trained some more. His regular training now demanded he faultlessly complete feats that just a few years ago he would have considered impossible; he spoke nearly two dozen languages and could read dozens more—being able to perfectly remember anything he saw or heard even after only a single viewing or hearing made such things much easier. His older brothers called it an eidetic memory, and said it was normal for all Astartes; for the Alpha Legion, nearly everyone had such a memory, to the point that most had to create a mental schematic to prevent their thoughts from becoming jumbled with random bits of memory. Tavish was called in to surgery—alone—and this time, his attending brother was Omegon.

His Primarch looked him steadily in the eyes. “Now comes the most important part of becoming Astartes. You have studied, and you know the Progenoid Glands contain the future of the Legion.” Tavish nodded; his Apothecary had not yet begun, and so he was permitted to move for a moment. Omegon continued. “In a way, the Glands contain your children, though you will not live to see them.”

Tavish blinked. “But Astartes are near-immortal,” he said. “And the Glands can be removed after ten years.”

“True,” Omegon answered. “But they cannot be removed without killing the Astartes who carries them, and the longer they remain with the Astartes, the more germ cells they hold. As with all your brothers, you are expected to recover the Glands at any cost save for your own life. If either of us believed in the gods, I’d call this a sacred duty,” Omegon allowed himself a wry smile. “For many other Legions, it is a sacred duty, gods or no…however, since you are more of a mechanically-minded sort, you won’t be required to learn how to create gene-seed from the germ cells.”

“The process is quite involved,” Tavish’s Apothecary commented. “Any one mistake can ruin an entire batch.”

“Right…” Despite the gravity of the duty and his lack of interest in healing, Tavish was slightly disappointed to find there was a skill he would not be permitted to practice. Even though his previous demonstrations of his skills were just barely on the near side of passable. Even though he found the medical books difficult to understand even with a better trained battle-brother available to explain them.

“Sorry about that, but…” Omegon shrugged, and Tavish nodded. The Legion was more important than any one Astartes’ pride. He laid back against the table, and held still while Omegon strapped him down with the woven-metal cords. His Primarch kept a hand on his head while the Apothecary cut his way into Tavish’s neck; the first of the Glands was tucked under the artery that fed his brain, just next to his windpipe, though Tavish didn’t feel it when he breathed. The pain barely registered in Tavish’s brain, though it was comparatively worse than the pain of his chest being cracked open one more time. The second gland was placed just above his hearts, between his right and middle lungs; perhaps he should have felt its presence with every heartbeat, but Tavish again felt nothing.

Once he had healed from the procedure, Tavish’s brow furrowed when he saw Omegon slicing his wrist open. “Unfortunately for me, the Progenoid Glands need a stronger shot of Primarch blood. It can’t be mixed with anything, and the fresher the better.” He sighed heavily, and offered his bleeding wrist to Tavish.

“I suppose you can’t get much fresher than this…” Tavish commented as he bit down. For a moment, nothing happened, but then something stirred in his gut. Memories that were not his own at first stirred, and then overwhelmed his consciousness. He watched from an outside perspective as Omegon was attacked and then captured by worm-monsters; he saw Omegon be tortured until he broke and obeyed their orders; he saw Omegon be rescued and returned to Terra in the arms of the Emperor; he saw the Emperor carefully reach out to Omegon’s damaged mind, doing everything he could to calm him, though he never fully healed.

The memories ended. Tavish pitched forward and was caught by the Apothecary; Omegon had detached Tavish from his wrist at some point and was standing some distance away, very carefully not looking at Tavish. For a long time, the operating theater was silent; eventually Tavish spoke. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” Omegon’s nerves were brittle, and he motioned for the Apothecary to take Tavish out.

“For attacking you that first night.” Tavish was grateful for his Apothecary’s support; he doubted he would be able to make it to the dressing or recovery rooms without him. Omegon didn’t reply. Thankfully, there were others in the recovery room when Tavish entered; most of them had a similar shell-shocked look to Tavish, and all had opted to read or spar quietly rather than talk to one another.

Three months later, Tavish was called to the surgical chamber one last time, along with his group. The last two months had been spent building their power armor from the various pieces available to them; Tavish had quietly painted the Imperial Aquila on the inside of one of his pauldrons. So far, only his Primarchs and the Emperor knew of it, and they had said nothing. One last time he lay back on the operating table; this time, the cords were looser than normal, and Tavish could rotate his arms more or less freely, though he couldn’t lift them from the table.

This time, his Apothecary was careful to cut along predetermined lines—places where Tavish’s electoo could repair itself, or be repaired with minimal effort—and very carefully lifted his skin away from his muscles. Tavish had to bite down hard on the iron bar his attending brother provided from the sheer _pain_ ; the metal dented from the force of his initial bite and dented further the more Tavish continued to bite. He felt his muscles bulging as he did everything in his power to not scream or bellow, and barely noticed the Apothecary working as quickly as he could to slide some cool-feeling, sinuously soft material onto the major muscle groups of his chest, back, and belly. The pain eased somewhat when his Apothecary carefully replaced his skin and allowed Tavish to heal; the torso portion of his electoo spasmodically glitched through a variety of colors.

When Tavish was guided to a sit—he relaxed his jaw enough that the attending brother removed the iron bar—he thought it was over. It wasn’t; he gripped his attending brother’s hand hard when the first flash of pain from the Apothecary’s blade slicing through both freshly-healed skin and newly-implanted Carapace. A second battle-brother walked over to grip his other hand—the attending brother for one of his groupmates. Briefly, Tavish glanced over and saw the Apothecary assigned to the groupmate closing his charge’s eyes. “Time of death, 0234 Terran hours,” they said in the same clinical tone the oldest Legionnaires used for everything. Tavish inhaled, ground his teeth, and bore the continued flashes of pain.

Their name was Yenael. They had originally been an elf. A trained warrior, like Tavish, but from the capital city of Denerim. Like Tavish, they had refused to bend to the humans surrounding them; like Tavish, they had come very close to the breaking point when the Alpha Legion arrived and chose him in a manner not dissimilar to Tavish. They had been among the most graceful of the Neophytes, and had shown it by dancing whenever possible. They had even gone so far as to resurrect an ancient form of Terran dancing the Emperor called “Irish line dancing”, had taught the style to the others. Tavish had liked them very much.

“Brother, are you with us?” someone was asking. Tavish wasn’t sure when he had closed his eyes, but opened them to the concerned face of his original attending brother and the slightly more concerned face of the attending brother who had just lost Yenael. It took Tavish several tries before he could properly manage to speak.

“Yes. I’m here,” he said. The relief on his second attendant’s face was powerful, so Tavish managed a weak smile even though his spine _hurt_ like nothing had ever hurt before, even though there were burning holes all over his chest and stomach. Both his attendants helped him down off the table and supported him to the recovery room; the burning pain eased somewhat after Tavish had drunk the beet juice and blood that activated his implants.

He was the first to make it into recovery, and thankfully he wasn’t the last. Two of his five groupmates also stumbled in, one supported, as Tavish had been, between two attending battle-brothers. The other seemed less aware than they should have been; their attending brother kept asking them questions, things like who they were, where they were, what they had been told just before the procedure. Thankfully, they were answering, but there was a slight lag in their answers that would have been normal for a mortal, but was worrying for an Astartes and a Neophyte.

Occasionally, Tavish was asked a similar series of questions; he answered promptly, without hesitation, his mind clearing of the residual pain over the course of an hour. Over the course of the next hour, his chest felt strangely tight and compressed, but as with the electoo, the sensation was so constant that Tavish simply stopped registering it. Besides, his continued training would only wait for the last round of funerals; six more had died besides the two in Tavish’s group, most of them those who had elected to receive their full body electoo early. Tavish was one of the few survivors of that number; it was unfortunately expected, and was why Tavish was watched so much more closely than his fellow Neophytes.

Four months passed. Tavish celebrated his eighteenth birthday by hunting a creature the Primarchs named “ogre” with his bare hands; the challenge was exhilarating, but there was something strange about its blood, and so he took several samples of its corpse to bring back to the ship. He was aware of a dark-skinned human with black hair and beard watching him closely during his hunt and sample collection, but since a mortal would not have noticed him, Tavish did not outwardly react to him until he made it back to the ship. There, he gave a full account to his Primarchs, the Lord Commander Primarch Guilliman, and the Emperor; the Emperor was most interested the creature’s samples, while his Primarchs were most interested in the man Tavish had noticed.

So, while Tavish entered a room adjacent to the main operating theater—where his Carapace would be fully integrated into his system—his Primarchs and several Legionnaires dug up as much information as they could on the man and the group he belonged to. The discussion was somewhat furious, Tavish noticed as he listened through the vox-clip, as the man (Duncan) turned out to be a Grey Warden, and the Grey Wardens made mention of an initiation rite but had no information of what happened in that rite. Similarly, they made reference to creatures called Darkspawn, but gave no information on what they were; what external information was available was, in everyone aboard the ship’s opinion, woefully incomplete and tainted with religious perception.

Tavish pondered quietly while his Apothecary—he had no attending brother as this was a relatively minor procedure—poked holes through Tavish’s flesh and into bundles of what felt like nerves, but didn’t hurt nearly as much. When he looked, he saw that the bundles were black rather than the white of his natural nerves, though he didn’t have long to look before the Apothecary filled the freshly cut holes with metal plugs. They tickled if prodded, strangely, but the feeling of walking around in the suit of power armor Tavish had made…

Actually being suited up—Tavish couldn’t simply climb into the power armor, since he wasn’t flexible enough even with his training to make every necessary connection—took time, but Tavish felt _complete_ once the process was finished, even without the helmet locked in. There was a satisfying _click_ when the pieces of his armor lined up with the ports all over his body, and then Tavish could move as quickly and quietly as he could in his own skin. The armor was more an extension of his body than anything else, just as his power daggers—swords by anyone else’s standards—were extensions of his arms.

The day after he and the other Neophytes had been fitted with their Carapace ports, they were all called in to the largest room on the ship. Tavish and the others all spared a glance at each other; seeing the same face endlessly repeated would once have disquieted Tavish, but after everything he had been through, he could only find it comforting. He had known, in the back of his mind, that there had been thirty Neophytes at the beginning of his training and elevation to Astartes, and he had known that many had died throughout the implantation process, yet seeing only a dozen Neophytes remaining was more than a little surprising.

No one spoke, however. They stood calmly, at loose attention, aware that the Lord Commander watched them distantly. Their expressions did not change when both Alpharius and Omegon entered and stood before them; Tavish, for his part, only felt calm expectation. Alpharius spoke first. “All of you came to us as mortals. Either you were noticed for possessing the abilities we favor,” he paused slightly, his gaze landing on Tavish and three other Neophytes. “Or you were chosen to create a team for such a person.” Many of the Neophytes around Tavish nodded slightly.

Omegon stepped forward slightly. “All of you passed our tests. You have trained, and you have excelled at your training. You have learned everything we required of you, and you have gone out of your way to seek additional knowledge. More importantly, you have survived every procedure, and have transformed from mortal to Astartes, whether you began as human or as elf.” He paused briefly. “Kneel, Neophytes.”

As one, they obeyed him, and kept their eyes on their Primarchs as Alpharius spoke again. “In another time, you would be called squires. In this moment, you would swear oaths of knighthood, and of fealty to your king or lord. You would swear to uphold a code of chivalry, to protect the weak, and to defend the virtues of your fellows.” He paused, drew a breath. “In another time, such oaths could be easily upheld, even by a Legion of spies. We will require no such oaths from you.”

“But know this,” Omegon said, and his face was more serious than any of them could recall seeing it. “Should you break faith with us without being ordered to do so, and should you break from the Emperor and the Imperium below him with neither orders nor good reason, we will hunt you as Traitor, and you will find no safe haven.”

Both of them paused to let their words sink in, and then both spoke in unison. “Neophytes, you know your duties to your Primarchs. You will all be required to do things which the Imperium, the High Lords of Terra, the Lord Commander, and even the Emperor will not approve of. Yet you will complete your tasks as best you see fit, and only the ending of the universe itself will stop you. If you understand and accept your duties…” Again the Primarchs paused, looking over the gathering. “Rise, Alpharius.”

As one, the former Neophytes rose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> High risk, high reward.
> 
> Peep ownership!  
> Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
> Bioware/EA: Dragon Age and related  
> me: the writing, Tavish, and the Emperor's name

**Author's Note:**

> In which the Alpha Legion (somehow) arrives on Thedas and decides to start recruitment there. Unless they didn't. Of course Guilliman _says_ he saw it, but what if he's lying to you? Or what if he didn't see what he thinks he saw? You don't know for sure-- _BLAM!_ Anyway this is my first attempt to describe how one might go from mortal to space marine.
> 
> And in which we also learn that it is not impossible for a Thedan elf to be an astartes candidate. Tavish is entirely mine, and while we're on the subject, I really need to finish playing Dragon Age...I like it, I just don't wanna finish. In game he's my city-elf rogue. Why is this possible? Short version: it's established lore in Dragon Age that elf + human = human. To me, this indicates that an elf is just a phenotype of human; it's also theoretically possible that elves lost their immortality because of a pathogen or something the humans brought over when they came to the continent. Don't think that last is confirmed, but meh. It's my headcanon and I will die with it.
> 
> Peep ownership!  
> Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
> Bioware/EA: Dragon Age and related  
> me: Tavish, his sister, and the writing.


End file.
